Review of The Return of the King, by J.R.R. Tolkien

The Return of the King by J.R.R. Tolkien

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


I’ve finished my reread of The Lord of the Rings! Yes, we has! (in Gollum-speak) The highlight has to be Frodo and Sam climbing Mt. Doom, and then the apocalyptic explosion when the deed is done. (If you haven’t read it or seen the movie, I won’t tell you what that deed is.) Their trek through the sere wilderness around the mountain fills one with thirst and dread. While this third part of the trilogy is deadly serious--as it needs to be--Tolkien still manages to provide comic relief in the form of Orcs. As it turns out, Orcs sound like country yokels when one gets to hear them speak. Their minds are not turned toward the higher things (just saying). In fact, they have a propensity to self-destruct, rather like Looney Tunes characters.

The third part also gives a portrait of one of the few female characters, Eowyn, the shield-maiden who goes to war in the garb of a man, like Brunhilde or the Old Norse valkyries of legend. But Tolkien makes clear that she is out of her element in this male world. In the words of Aragorn, the hero-king, when she is injured in battle, “Alas! For she was pitted against a foe beyond the strength of her mind or body” (848). She is also shown to be out of her depth in her feelings of unrequited love--an emotion that Tolkien portrays almost as a disease, or mental illness. Whatever her flaws, she is the most fully characterized woman in the novel. Aragorn’s true love mainly shows up for the wedding; even the Ent-wives are nowhere to be seen!

Trees and forests, much more than women, play an important role in The Lord of the Rings--and this is no less true in The Return of the King. The area around Mt. Doom is shown to be absent of trees or other growing things, except thorny brambles. The most stunning evidence of destructive industrialization when the Hobbits return home is the loss of the trees; in their place is a great chimney and “a great brick building straddling the stream, which it fouled with a streaming and stinking outflow” (993). Even the “party tree” that launched the novel and the quest is gone. In this, Tolkien’s thinking was prescient, as our precious world drifts ever closer to human-wrought destruction. At the end of the novel, he holds out hope, due to the wonderful elven dust that fertilizes and re-greens the Shire. And, to replace the “party tree,” a miraculous mallorn tree with silver bark and golden flowers from the forests of Lothlorien. Throughout this marvelous work, Tolkien balances destruction with rebirth, despair with hope, and high seriousness with humor. A marvelous work, which is also a work of marvels.




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