The Return Of The King - J. R. R. Tolkien, 1955 ★★★★½

Closing the Ring

The last of J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lord Of The Rings trilogy, Return Of The King strikes me as one of the great payoff books in Western literature. It may not be a perfect novel, yet it rewards the investment paid by the reader of prior LOTR installments, deepens and broadens the insights one gleaned from reading the other books, and, unless you are a goblin or troll, sends you away happy.

The one caveat I would offer is that the narrative is bogged down, more than somewhat, by the author's deep fascination with the various mythological facets of Middle Earth, and more specifically his eagerness to impart this upon you. I for one could have done without the welter of information regarding who married who centuries before the plot elements of Return Of The King occurred. Am I the only person who feels that way?

Still, all in all, a fine novel, and a terrific capper.

The forces of Good are on the march as this book opens, but as with the two prior Lord Of The Rings installments, face long odds. From Mordor, evil Sauron directs his legions of orcs, humans, and assorted beasts of darkness to sweep across neighboring Gondor as his latest attempt at global conquest. Yet the greatest threat to Sauron is in the heart of Mordor itself, in the form of two tiny halflings who carry with them the Ring Sauron needs to bring Middle Earth to heel, the Ring which can only be destroyed where it was made, in Mordor itself.

But what if Sauron were to spy these pitiful interlopers? Then great would be their peril, and everyone else's, as the man with the plan, the wizard Gandalf, points out:

"We have not the Ring. In wisdom or great folly it has been sent away to be destroyed, lest it destroy us. Without it we cannot by force defeat his force. But we must at all costs keep his Eye from his true peril."

A serious mood permeates the novel to an extent greater than even the prior two books; even when there is victory, and there often is, defeat is always close behind. Frodo the Hobbit has his day, sure, but also seems to suffer from something akin to post-traumatic combat stress. Other characters suffer greatly, and even die, in opposition to the evil forces arrayed against them. We are a long ways from the merry jaunt of The Hobbit which started it all, and more than ever before, this is a good thing.

As a reading experience, there's a lot for one to unpack while reading this book. That's as true today as ever. In the time of its original publication, in 1955, there were the shadows of World War II and the Cold War, all-or-nothing battles against aggressors who seemed to hold all the cards and were brutal besides. Tolkien captures the imagery of burnt-out landscapes, suggestive of saturation bombing or atomic attack, in his descriptions of Mordor as well as the stormclouds rising over Gondor:

“The world was darkling. The very air seemed brown, and all things about were black and grey and shadowless; there was a great stillness.”

The more I read of the Ring, the more I think of the powers of atomic energy and another simple word we used to capitalize back in the day, when it had similar world-altering import: The Bomb.

Today, the associations one works through while reading this book are more likely to be imported from New Zealand, home of Peter Jackson and location for his hyper-scenic Lord Of The Rings film shoots. These are great movies in my mind, fresh and lively and totally entertaining, but I feel Return Of The King is the one time in that trilogy (I haven't yet seen his Hobbit films) where the movie is something of a letdown after the book.

That's not quite the same thing as saying the book is better. At least Jackson's version of Return isn't saddled with a long postscript regarding the subjugation of the hobbits' homeland. [I sense this may have World War II resonances as well, specifically the new order Great Britain found itself under, of enforced deprivation, at war's end.] Yet the film doesn't quite capture the sense of wonder Return has, of mythic glories reborn, of ancient warriors resurrected. There's too much of a reliance on CGI, something Jackson didn't lean on so much in the earlier adaptations.

With Tolkien, human imagination alone had to suffice, and in Return it proves more than enough. He manages an eerie ambiance without describing very much when he has his hero Aragorn journey down the Paths Of The Dead, and the result is an example of conjuring much by saying little.

J. R. R. Tolkien as he was around the time of Return Of The King's publication in 1955. Image from The Guardian.

In terms of narrative, the novel is a significant bounce back from The Two Towers. This time, there’s unity even as the story is divided again into parts. Tolkien’s ability to create cliffhanger suspense followed by sudden, dramatic shifts was never on greater display than here, and makes him more readable than ever.

The glaring weakness of Return for me is the title situation, which takes up more than a quarter of my Houghton Mifflin edition. Tolkien here launches into descriptive overdrive, laying out the destinies of assorted minor players and bogging his story down with various lineages. Really, once you get past the resolution of Frodo’s quest, you don’t really care so much about which man ends up with which woman and so on. But Tolkien spends a lot of time on this stuff anyway.

I've never been as captivated by Lord Of The Rings as I hoped, but I found it engaging at the least and quite involving in parts, particularly in the first half of this book and the second half of Fellowship Of The Ring. The trilogy is a one-of-a-kind delight for fantasy lovers and general readers alike. Your own miles may vary, but I strongly suspect you won’t be bored.