The Return of the King

The Return of the King was published in 1955 and completes the three volumes of The Lord of the Rings. It carries the ending of the story, and it also carries the appendices: the chronology of the Third Age, the histories of the kingdoms, the account of Aragorn and Arwen, and the material on the languages that Tolkien had been building since the First World War. Its publication history is unusually tangled: Tolkien had proposed dividing the work into six books to his publisher in 1953, with the last two to be called The War of the Ring and The End of the Third Age.

The volume's two halves are separated by geography and tone. The war story belongs to Aragorn, Gandalf, Eowyn, Merry and Pippin, and it is written as a campaign: the ride to the aid of Gondor, the siege, the muster, the march on the Black Gate and the last stand that exists mainly to distract Sauron. The other half belongs to Frodo and Sam in Mordor, where the plot is a matter of water, weight and will. Tolkien alternates them and then brings them together at the mountain.

After the Ring is destroyed the novel keeps going, which is unusual for its genre and one of the reasons it is remembered: the scouring of the Shire, the return, the farewells at the Grey Havens and the long closing. Critics at the time were divided, with W. H. Auden among the volume's defenders and Edwin Muir among the sceptics. Edwin Muir, who had praised The Fellowship of the Ring in 1954, attacked the completed book in 1955 in The Sunday Observer as a boys’ adventure story.