The Return of the King

If you haven't read The Lord of the Rings, I'd recommend it!  It has great imagination, literary beauty, and moral beauty.


Warning: spoilers (and random thoughts) ahead!

I just finished the audiobook of The Return of the King.  I needed something to keep me mentally engaged while I drove myself on a road trip for work, so I found ROTK at the library.

I'd already read it a couple of times when I was growing up (once in elementary school, once in middle school, and once in high school), but I don't remember it being so moving.  I was surprised to find myself coming close to tears at Theoden's death, and then at Frodo's passing into the Grey Havens.

The movies had driven home to me how much truth, beauty, courage, and wisdom are in these stories.  And now I find it reflected in the books, too.  It's proof that great imagination, and literary and moral beauty can coexist in one book.

This is the first time that I'd noticed: the ending of ROTK seemed like an exposition of Sam's exclamation, "Gandalf!  I thought you were dead.  But then I thought I was dead myself.  Is everything sad going to come untrue?" (emphasis mine).  It's great to see everything sad become untrue in Middle Earth.  And I long for that in our world, too.  Come, Lord Jesus, come!

And yet it shows us realism, with our world in the present and in its future promise: Frodo has a wound that can never be healed in Middle Earth.  But he goes to the Grey Havens, his ship sails, and, though Sam can't see it, fair things await Frodo: "the grey rain-curtain turned all to silver glass and was rolled back, and [Frodo] beheld white shores and beyond them a far green country under a swift sunrise.  But to Sam the evening deepened to darkness as he stood at the Haven..."

Back in high school, one of my friends pooh-poohed the ending, when Sam says, "Well, I'm back."  But Jonathan must not have seen how torn Sam was in his desire to be in both worlds--to be with his wife and to be with his friend and master.  This ending wasn't the aberration of a master writer; it was his graceful swing from sadness back into real life, where Sam must live undivided, wholly in his own world for the present.