The Return of the King

The Climax the Whole Saga Was Built For

The Return of the King arrives carrying the full weight of two volumes, and for a long stretch it delivers exactly the grand finale that weight promises. The siege of Minas Tirith, the lighting of the beacons, the desperate ride of the Rohirrim into a battle they cannot win, the duel between Éowyn and the Witch-king of Angmar — these are the passages every reader remembers, and they land with a force that no amount of imitation has dulled. Tolkien has spent a thousand pages making this world feel real and these peoples feel worth saving, and the payoff in the fields before Gondor is one of the great sustained climaxes in English fiction.

Running underneath all of it is the thread that actually matters: Frodo and Sam, reduced almost to nothing, dragging themselves across the slag of Mordor toward the only fire that can destroy the Ring. Tolkien cuts the soaring war chapters against this small, grim crawl, and the contrast is deliberate. The fate of everything depends not on the heroes in shining armor but on two exhausted hobbits who have nearly stopped being able to hope. Sam carrying Frodo up the mountain — not the Ring, but Frodo himself — is the image the entire trilogy has been building toward.

A Victory Won by Failure

What makes the climax at Mount Doom so much stranger and richer than its imitators is that Frodo fails. At the last moment, on the edge of the fire, he cannot give up the Ring; its hold is total, and he claims it for himself. The quest is saved only because Gollum, that pitiable creature Frodo spared two volumes earlier, attacks him and falls into the fire with the Ring still in his grasp. The whole world is rescued not by heroism but by an accident that mercy made possible. Every act of pity in the trilogy — Bilbo’s, Frodo’s, even Sam’s grudging restraint — turns out to have been the real load-bearing structure. Tolkien, writing in the shadow of two world wars, refuses the fantasy of the strong hero triumphing through strength. Salvation comes sideways, through weakness and forgiveness.

The Endings After the Ending

And then Tolkien does the thing that divides readers and that I consider the bravest choice in the book. The Ring is destroyed roughly two-thirds of the way through the volume. He could have ended there, on the eagles and the celebration. Instead he keeps going — through the coronation, the long journeys home, and finally the return to the Shire, which the travelers find spoiled and industrialized, occupied by the ruined Saruman. The hobbits must fight one more battle, smaller and meaner than any in the war, to reclaim their own home.

This “scouring of the Shire” is the passage modern readers, primed by the films to expect the story to stop at the volcano, find hardest to accept. It is also the point of the whole book. Tolkien is insisting that victory does not roll back damage, that you cannot leave to save the world and come home to find it untouched, and that the people who carry the heaviest burdens are often the ones who can least enjoy the peace they win. Frodo, wounded in body and spirit, cannot settle back into the life he saved. His final departure over the sea — leaving Sam, who can go home and live, to inherit the ordinary happiness Frodo no longer can — is the quietest and most devastating ending in fantasy.

Why It Endures

The Return of the King could have been a simple triumph, and it would still have been a fine book. What makes it a great one is its refusal of simplicity. It earns its joy and then complicates it; it gives you the catharsis of the battlefield and then asks what the battle cost. The bittersweetness that has become the default mode of serious fantasy — the sense that even won wars leave wounds — begins here, fully formed.

For first-time readers, the density can be steep: the volume comes freighted with appendices, genealogies, and the long aftermath. But the demands are inseparable from the rewards. This is a conclusion that treats its readers as adults capable of holding triumph and grief at once, and it is precisely that maturity that has kept it from aging the way its thousand imitators have.

The Quiet Heroes of the Climax

One of the volume’s deepest satisfactions is that its most decisive blows are struck by its least likely figures. The Witch-king of Angmar, the greatest of Sauron’s servants, has been prophesied to fall by no hand of man — and he is destroyed by Éowyn, a woman who rode to war in disguise, and Merry, a hobbit everyone tried to leave behind. Tolkien arranges the trilogy’s largest mythic payoff so that it turns on exactly the people the powerful overlooked, and the pattern repeats with Frodo, Sam, and even Gollum at Mount Doom. This is not incidental. The whole moral architecture of The Lord of the Rings insists that history is moved by the small, the disregarded, and the merciful, and The Return of the King makes that argument its climax rather than merely its theme.

Final Verdict

Our rating: 4.9/5 — The finest conclusion in epic fantasy, and possibly the reason the genre learned to take itself seriously. It delivers the great battles and then insists on their cost, ending not on triumph but on the truth that some who save the world cannot stay to enjoy it. Essential.

This completes the trilogy that began with The Fellowship of the Ring and continued in The Two Towers. For the deep history behind it, read The Silmarillion.