The Return of The King by J.R.R Tolkien (Harper Collins 1991) pp. 733-735
There are many who fear the word, doom, believing it to be a word that speaks of destruction. And let us begin by saying that it does speak that way. Indeed it is a word that speaks of judgement and it is words of judgement that Gandalf speaks at the gates of Minas Tirith as he arrives there upon Shadowfax bearing Pippin before him.
The guards at the gate see Gandalf as the herald of war as is their belief about him and in reply to them he has no words of comfort for them.
The storm “is upon you,” he declares to them. “I have ridden upon its wings. Let me pass! I must come to your Lord Denethor, while his stewardship lasts. Whatever betide, you have come to the end of the Gondor you have known.”
This is the end of the Third Age of the world. Its terrible climax as Sauron reaches out his hand seeking to bring all things under his rule and domination, lacking only the ruling Ring to make his victory absolutely complete. If he triumphs, as Galadriel said to Frodo after he had looked into her mirror “then we are laid bare to the Enemy.” But if Frodo succeeds in his mission “then our power is diminished, and Lothlórien will fade, and the tides of Time will sweep it away”.
I speak here of the ending of the time of the Elves in Middle-earth but what of Gondor? In what way will its end have come? Surely if Frodo succeeds in destroying the Ring then Sauron will fall and Gondor will triumph being free from its greatest foe forever?
The clue to understanding what Gandalf says to the guards lies in his reference to the Lord Denethor, the Steward of Gondor. “I must come to your Lord Denethor, while his stewardship lasts.” Gandalf is not prophesying the particular end to which Denethor will come on the day of the Battle of the Pelennor Fields. It is the return of the king to which he alludes here. Aragorn, the Lord Elessar, is making his way to the city even as Gandalf speaks, and either he will fall with Gondor or he will claim its crown as its rightful lord. The Gondor that its people have known for many centuries will come to an end either in defeat or triumph.
The Return of the King, the final volume of The Lord of the Rings, is a story of endings and new beginnings. Of course there is the ending of the great evil, the shadow that has oppressed the peoples of Middle-earth for many long years. As Sam will ask as he wakes at the Field of Cormallen: “Is everything sad going to come untrue? What’s happened to the world?” And one sadness has indeed “come untrue”, but not all that is sad. Lothlórien will fade as the power of the Three Elven Rings will fade with the destruction of the One Ring, and their keepers, Galadriel, Elrond and Gandalf, will depart from Middle-earth, and with them will depart the enchantment, the song that Sam felt himself to be a part of in Lothlórien, with which they enriched the world. The disenchanted world in which we live, the burden that we must bear, is in part the fruit of Frodo’s triumph. How much would the readers of Tolkien’s great tales wish to be able to walk into the enchanted lands of Lothlórien and Rivendell in the clear light of day even as Frodo and his companions were able to do, but all we can do is to catch glimpses of Faerie and to carry them in our hearts in the diminished world that is the one in which we live, learning perhaps the art of re-enchantment as we bring what we have glimpsed to the task of ordinary life, to find “heaven in ordinary”, as George Herbert puts it in his poem, Prayer.
And so too will the Gondor that its people have known pass away, and we will journey with its steward, in his sad attachment to what has long been passing away under his watch. We will see that not all will welcome the possibility of renewal but will reject it. But renewal will come, even though much will be lost, and some will embrace it, even while they bear the loss of much that was beautiful.
Wisdom from The Lord of the Rings 
I have sometimes remarked to friends that I find The Lord of the Rings to be a very sad story. This post gets at the reality that underlies the heroic actions of the main characters. Thank you for sharing your insights.
Thank you so much for sharing your thoughts.
I am thinking about your feeling that LOTR is a sad story. My greatest sadness when I first read it as a teenager was that it was over but as the years have passed I have felt both sadness and joy. Edwin Muir’s poem, The Good Man in Hel imagines a good man finding himself in hell as a kind of cosmic accident. The last verse ends thus:
One doubt of evil would bring down such a grace,
Open such a gate, and Eden could enter in,
Hell be a place like any other place,
And love and hate and ,life and death begin.
In other words, ordinary life with sorrow and joy woven through it.
Hello Reverend Winter,
This is so poignant: “But renewal will come, even though much will be
lost, and some will embrace it, even while they bear the loss of much
that was beautiful.”
Changes, beginnings and endings, define life on earth. Stability is a
rare phenomenon and doesn’t last; and because our own lives are so
short, we think stability should be the norm. It isn’t. So when we
experience the end of something or someone, we may not live long enough
to see the new beginning it inevitably leads to — rather like Moses,
who, after finally reaching the Promised Land, could not enter it
himself. I suppose this is where Faith comes in, faith that there WILL
be renewal.
If we’re lucky and pay attention, we may well “glimpse heaven in the
ordinary” (experience moments of grace), and maybe that’s enough for now.
Thanks for a very timely and thought-provoking reflection.
Blessings,
Kate
Thank you so much, once again, Kate. Yes,there will be renewal but Denethor refuses to see it that way because he has lost his son and he believes that his line is coming to an end. I remember once listening to a radio programme on the harsh winter of 1947 that ended with heavy flooding as the snow melted. A woman was interviewed whose home had been damaged by the flooding. “It’s worse than anything that happened during the war,” she complained. I found myself thinking, you mean worse than the bombing of London, or the Nazi death camps? Of course that is not what she meant. She meant that the flooding of 1947 was worse than anything that had happened to “her” during the war. Denethor loses interest in the welfare of his people because of his own private tragedy.
And please do call me, Stephen. I would regard it as a compliment. We have been corresponding here for a little while now, and I value your insights and encouragement.
Good morning, Stephen,
I suppose it’s a very human characteristic to put our own suffering
above that of others and lose sight of the bigger picture. But none of
our heroes in the Lord of the Rings ever lost sight of the “great story”
they were part of. Did any of them make much ado about their own
personal “destiny” or even use that word? Aragorn questions himself a
number of times, Frodo asks why he of all people had to deal with the
Ring, but they didn’t go on apriori about their destinies. Or did they?
Perhaps musings for another time.
Blessings,
Kate
I will be writing about each of the members of the Fellowship in the months ahead and I am sure that I will be thinking about your question but I found it so interesting that I can’t resist thinking about it now.
I think there is a real difference between being tempted to despair, or to become self obsessed, (the heart that curves in upon itself as Augustine put it) and giving into that temptation. Aragorn is an example of the former, Saruman and Denethor of the latter. I do not want when the line is crossed between the two. I am not sure where that line is within myself and the temptations with which I grapple. The devil is like a lion prowling about seeking whom he may devour.
I wrote a lot about Aragorn’s struggles in my reflections on his story as Tolkien tells in the first half of The Two Towers. It is a deeply moving thing.
Maybe this is really far-fetched, but I think at the end of the
Akallabeth, Tolkien might have been thinking of Thomas Aquinas’
“incurvatus in se” when he wrote “all roads had become bent” and “men
knew the world was indeed made round”, no escape from it but for a
blessed few who might still find the “Straight Way” beyond the circles
of the world where the Undying Lands existed.
The broken (or fallen) world was curved, and human beings were
thereafter incurvatus in se, in a state of “original sin” (as Aquinas
might have said).
Spinning the yarn further, Christians believe that Jesus Christ redeemed
us from incurvatus in se, saying that He himself is “the way, the truth
and the life”.
As to your comment, if despair is taken too far, doesn’t it become a
kind of self-obsession? Even if we all have some degree or form of
self-obsession, we are not hopeless cases!
I really like that thought, Kate. The relationship between the bent and straight roads and the incurvatus in se. Surely you are onto something here.