There is a moment near the end of The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King that has always resonated with me profoundly, apart from the general emotionality that fills out the rest of the movie’s resolutions.
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It is when Frodo, Sam, Pippin, and Merry are sitting in the Green Dragon together as some party (as is oft to occur in Hobbiton) is happening all around them. They are at a table with their ale and they simply exchange glances with each other. A year and a month ago, Merry and Pippin at least would have been right up there with all the merry-makers having a grand time. But things are different now, each of them has seen and experienced so much beyond what this little pastoral community can usually imagine –and they are the only ones who truly understand one another. In a series that could play fast and loose with fidelity to J.R.R. Tolkien’s text, here is a moment that feels closer to Tolkien than most other things in the trilogy. Peter Jackson confirmed in the audio commentary that the scene was meant explicitly to evoke the feelings of soldiers returning from war, specifically Tolkien and his friends returning from the First World War. They would leave their quaint towns and villages and return forever changed, while these little worlds remained in their ways. Only their veteran brothers –their survivor brothers, can comprehend what they’ve been through. There is a uniquely poignant and unbreakable bond, and I’ve never grasped its meaning more intimately than in this moment. A truly worthy end for these characters.
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The Return of the King is a movie known for its endings –in fact in the months following its release on December 17th 2003, it became a subject of much joking how many times the movie seemed to end on a fade to black or white, only for it to then keep going. It was already a long movie at nearly three and a half hours, and to some it felt indulgent; others saw them as a fully earned victory lap, still others found them each important conclusions that needed to be there. I, and I imagine most others who loved the movies were of the latter opinion. While each of the by my count five endings could have functioned well enough, in succession they bring every significant character and thematic beat of the trilogy to a cathartic close. By the last ending there is nothing more to say, a title card of “The End” appears and you are fully satisfied with that statement. The movie and the trilogy is fully, firmly done.
And it’s a rare thing, especially in the twenty years since, to see a lucrative movie franchise have the courage for a definitive end. There have been a couple: The Dark Knight Rises, the final Harry Potter film –these aren’t glowing examples, but are certainly better than the absolute aversion to endings expressed by their successor series. Part of the reason I loved Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 was that (for the most part) it was a dedicated ending. And it reminded me of exactly the value there is in a story being concluded, without any suggestion of continuation. No lingering threads, no post-credits scene, it’s just over.
But endings are much more important to The Return of the King than the satisfying conclusiveness yielded or the fact that there are a lot of them. The End is a motif threaded throughout the film represented in various aspects and to various emotional points. A sense of finality permeates so much of the action, the aesthetics, the themes –everything drives towards that point. Far be it from simply the number of finales that dominate the last fifteen minutes, The Return of the King in fact may be the most Ending I’ve ever seen a movie.
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One obvious way the film engages with this theme is in the permanent ending: death. This comes out in the form of character deaths, which aren’t actually a common thing in the Lord of the Rings trilogy, with The Return of the King featuring more secondary and tertiary named character deaths than either prior instalment. From Deagol to Saruman and Grima, Madril, Denethor (going out iconically), the Witch-King, King Theoden, the Mouth of Sauron, and of course Gollum followed by Sauron himself. Additionally, several characters come very close to death or are mistaken for dead, including Faramir, Merry, Eowyn, and Frodo (twice). Elsewhere, there is a murder plot afoot, and a whole Army of the Dead in this film even –death is constantly hanging over or in the vicinity of the heroes, especially the closer they get to the end of their journey.
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And there is a gravity inherent to death in the film, more than in its predecessors. Most notably in the doomed charge to retake Osgiliath after it was earlier besieged by orcs. The mournful procession as a mere handful of soldiers march out of the city to their near certain death, the citizens of Minas Tirith sombrely blessing them with tears and flowers. Similar on some level to the prelude to Helm’s Deep from The Two Towers, but with a more stirring context: rather than an illustration of a desperate self-defence against formidable odds, it is the mournfulness of men ordered to their deaths out of pride and incompetence (something I’m sure Tolkien understood very well). And the charge itself against a fortified opposition, juxtaposed against Pippin’s elegiac song and Denethor’s gluttonous apathy –even Gandalf’s silent meditation in a small autumnal courtyard, punctuates the point even more. This death of mostly unknown characters really means something.
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An earlier death, the death of Boromir comes back to haunt characters like Pippin and Faramir in a new light -we see the grave psychological impact of it on his father, and again later when Faramir appears to have died and Denethor takes pains to suicidally bury himself with his son. Death is a cancerous thing that can unbalance the mind. And it is also seen to unbalance nature. Ruin and decay permeate the air through a lot of the movie. The pastoral Shire or sweeping Fangorn Forest are far behind, very little of vivid Rohan, and even Rivendell is in its autumn, no doubt reflective of the Elves imminent departure. Instead we see the devastated husk of industry that is Isengard, the militarily flattened Osgiliath, even Minas Tirith is drawn as a decaying city, much more like the Roman ruins than Ancient Rome itself. Still worse though is Pippin’s vision of the city on fire, with as is typical of Tolkien, the destruction of nature a symbol for that of the soul of the world. It is seen in the dead forest that Frodo, Sam, and Gollum pass through early on, in the emptiness of Pelennor Fields, and of course in the land of death, Mordor itself. The environment through much of the movie, even in healthier places, is cold and bare -there are a lot of dark and lifeless caves our characters must move through -more harrowing places where the light cannot get in. It is in one of these where manifestations of death linger, the Dead Army cursed by their dishonour until they fulfil a broken oath; in the meantime a spectre of death in both man and nature. Elrond may as well be speaking to the audience when he says, “there is nothing left for you here, only death.”
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“But there is also life,” responds Arwen. She refers of course to the vision of her and Aragorn’s child, but it is a statement that also reflects a pervading attitude of many in the film towards death, grim and heavy though it may be. Deriving in the spiritual, which informed both Tolkien and so many of his influences on Lord of the Rings, a sense of glory and honour in righteous death is translated very often in the film. King Theoden anticipates death nobly and gives a rousing speech to his Rohirrim that very much does not paint over the doom in their fight. A similar sentiment comes later in Aragorn’s big speech at the gate of Mordor, with an even smaller army. And everyone (the audience included) is moved by it, recognizing a purpose in sacrifice for a greater good. There is some comfort taken in it, Gimli and Legolas affirming their bond of friendship before the end.
“End. No the journey doesn’t end here. Death is just another path, one that we all must take. The grey-rimmed curtain of this world rolls back and all turns to silver glass. And then you see it. White shores. And beyond, the far green country unto a swift sunrise.”
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What Gandalf is describing to Pippin at what could be their most hopeless moment is heaven -or a kind of heaven that may or may not be literal in this world -the Grey Havens certainly impart fairly blatant heavenly imagery, in its encompassing golden light emanating from the impenetrable horizon. It connects with themes of Tolkien’s Catholicism, reiterating their tenets in this Hollywood movie in a fashion that is both organic and effective to the purposes of relaying a sense of life after death. And it doesn’t necessarily have to be literal. The White Tree of Gondor, dead for generations, is believed will bloom on the return of the King and the peace he will bring. There is power in the hope for that. And in the more broad sense that there is meaning in death, justness in how it can come about. Once their oath is fulfilled, Aragorn releases the Army of Dead -their souls now free to rest -illustrated in their forms fading away like a deep, cathartic breathing out. If it can be likened to a death, Frodo’s departure from Middle-Earth at the end is even more comforting.
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There needs to be this kind of optimistic purpose against the onslaught of death and death imagery, given the film embodies an even firmer end, apocalypse, rather strongly. The contours of Middle-Earth are of course grand enough, some would even intuit Tolkien’s variation in the text on the Book of Revelation. And the film carries over certain apocalyptic references: Eowyn’s dream in Edoras, followed immediately by Pippin’s vision of Minas Tirith on fire, particularly the White Tree -symbol for the race of Men- burning itself. In practicality, there’s the demonic appearance of Minas Morgul, consistent with any such depiction of a Hell, and the imagery of the Nazgul’s fell beasts wreaking havoc that could be out of any pious Biblical speculation. Mordor is of course the centrepiece of this, a wasteland that is a living apocalypse, virtually devoid of life and light but for the red emanating from Sauron’s Eye and Mount Doom. Seeing it here so starkly, it calls to mind the “second darkness” Gandalf had referred to in The Fellowship of the Ring that Sauron wished to envelop the world in. Mordor is a harbinger, the world as it might become.
The story builds gradually to an apocalyptic crescendo virtually from the point that Gandalf and Pippin arrive at Minas Tirith, a city on the edge of light and dark. The big final battle is always in sight, “the doom of our time” as Gandalf refers to it. More bluntly of course is the language “the end of all things” -averted in the literal sense as Frodo says it, but up to that point it is the very thing the heroes are fighting against. The shadow of doom is invoked when Aragorn, Legolas, and Gimli enter the Paths of the Dead, when Frodo is pursued by Shelob -ancient monsters intruding on the story. The stars go out over Gondor, and with them dissipates hope.
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And yet Sam sees those stars through a minuscule window in the clouds over Mordor. As much as this film is concerned with apocalypse, it does not view it as necessarily final -much as Tolkien’s theology would dictate. “I do not believe this darkness will endure” says Faramir. “You shall live to see these days renewed -no more despair,” says Theoden. Both speak to Eowyn, herself by her actions in this film a symbol of a goodness of a different kind triumphing over evil. Deliberately placed right after Gandalf’s history lesson to Pippin about the decline of Gondor without her King, Frodo sees for only an instant in the sun, a crown of flowers on the broken bust of a king of old -foreshadowing amidst the gloom, of a restoration to come after. And if the War for the Ring can be likened to apocalypse, to Revelation more specifically, than its aftermath is surely that Eternal Life. Because with the defeat of Sauron, evil has essentially been vanquished in Middle-Earth. Every insinuation points to everlasting peace and harmony under King Elessar, stretching from Mordor to the Shire. It is a stated reason why the Elves and Gandalf leave -they are no longer needed.
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Other fantasies have critiqued this idyll, and indeed great works have come out of the efforts to interrogate or move beyond such notions. But a clean end may still be a powerful one. Resolution is in various respects and for various characters its own critical theme in The Return of the King. This movie of course resolves several beats and plot points and character arcs from across the trilogy -Saruman’s last stand and death brings to a close his lingering threat, Eowyn’s love for Aragorn is finally confronted and tempered, Gollum’s malice is revealed to Frodo, Frodo and Sam at long last make it to Mordor, and of course the big one as implied by the title: Aragorn accepts his calling to be King. And everything else wraps up neatly in the battle at the Black Gate, the destruction of the ring, and everything afterwards. All of these little endings, including those deaths and near-deaths mentioned before, even before the climax, coalesce around a greater sense of closure -nothing is to be left open, everything must end. Though in this sense it is a good and necessary ending. Everybody and everything in this world will find their place, serve their part. There is a fateful aspect to it, even in something like Arwen interrupting her apparent resolution from the last film to inspire a new one, steadfast in her brighter future. And yet the virtue in this is that the sense of completion feels all the more true, warranted even. It is a clean resolution, comforting.
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But in another sense of the term, we see a theme of resolve expressed through so many characters, a stirring determination. Gandalf in his faith in Frodo’s journey, Aragorn in his dedication to fight to the last, even under the real possibility that Frodo is dead and the quest has failed. But nobody has more resolve than the two hobbits grasping their way to Mount Doom -Frodo quite literally in the most powerful articulation of his determination to finish his task: sighting the Crack of Doom above him and crawling with the last ounces of his own strength towards it. However Sam especially is the model here, as Frodo is weighed down and distracted by the ring’s temptation -leaving Sam to shoulder the brunt of emphatic resolution. In one of the film’s great dramatic emotional moments he carries Frodo up that mountain. But his resolve is seen in emotional support too, the way he encourages Frodo, comforts his thoughts of dying. Low-key the most emotionally powerful beat of the film is a mirror from its beginning to the last act; where Sam reveals to Frodo on the outskirts of Minas Morgul that he is rationing their food explicitly for the journey home -a tender sentiment of conviction to both himself and Frodo that there is hope- and then later at the foot of the mountain when Frodo expresses modest concern they won’t have water left for the return journey, Sam soberly admits, “I don’t think there will be a return journey”, having accepted the circumstance himself. And yet there is no grief in this -Frodo has long known. It is merely the bittersweet acknowledgement that finishing this task is greater than themselves, that it’ll be worth their lives, and is a mark of their mutual resolve and love -having regained both since casting off Gollum.
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The Return of the King is somewhat courageous in its illustration of the end as not simply a resolution but a release. Here it is at its most emphatic, but the sentiment can be felt too in such things as Theoden’s calm and accepting attitude to his passing -something he has perhaps been waiting for since Theodred’s death one movie ago. The idea that his death can be a comfort to him is a radical one, but imbued with the mythic gravitas that Jackson is so good at relating here, it is wholly right. The Army of the Dead is quite literally released from their ghostly enslavement and it is nothing if not cathartic.
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And the destruction of Barad-dur, shot with glorious intonations is met with relief by all the heroes at the Black Gate. Everything they have fought for has culminated in this moment, and the sobering fact that it is now over is such a joy. Few movies truly capture that sensation of the weight coming off, I must say, in lieu of an end of such magnitude. And for Frodo and Sam it is the most potent. Many mocked Frodo’s ecstatic fervour in the wake of the ring’s destruction, and especially in his reunion with the rest of the Fellowship, but Elijah Wood understood the sheer depth of happiness in such a release and played it to perfection.
We think of endings, as in ending endings without necessarily a new beginning to look forward to, in typically drab terms. Sadness and mournfulness, a sense of loss. Something is over, and that must be associated with negative things. But The Return of the King challenges that view, and while the text that Jackson is working off of does so from a highly Christian theological vantage point (Heaven being but a second eternal life and all), the film encapsulates it also in somewhat more pervasive terms of seeing the good in endings –death or otherwise- and what necessary relief they bring the soul. Just as with Gandalf’s comment about tears, not all ends are an evil.
“How do you pick up the threads of an old life? How do you go on when in your heart you begin to understand there is no going back? There are some things that time cannot mend. Some hurts that go too deep, that have taken hold.”
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Frodo’s release at the crack of Doom is only the half of it. And he still needs that further end that the mere completion of the quest didn’t quite yield him. Its scars last too much, the pain is still there. I don’t know how much has been said on the theme of PTSD as it applies to The Return of the King –there’s no dramatic psychological effect we see on the hobbits once home from the war. But I would venture it is baked in –before the term existed I’m sure Tolkien witnessed it in his friends and may have even thought of Frodo’s end as a deliberate relief to the trauma. Regardless we can now identify that trauma, and feel more stringently the relief of Frodo being free of it. We see the same linger in Bilbo, en route to the Grey Havens, as he asks one more time about that old ring of his. And we feel the comfort in him being permitted to let it go. The moment he says he is ready for one more adventure, it’s clear Frodo is too. It is one of the most heart-wrenching conclusions in any film, as Frodo reveals his desire to leave, hugs Merry, Pippin, and Sam –leaving the lattermost with a kiss and the charge of closing the book, literally. In recent years though the moment that moves me the most is when Frodo steps onto the ship and he turns to look back on his friends one last time; and for the first time since before Gandalf told him the truth about the ring, he looks happy. Here at the westernmost end of Middle-Earth, where he can leave all of it behind, his burden has at long last been lifted. The release is final. Frodo is at peace. And no one can claim it is not the ending he deserved.
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All of these ends however must also be taken with the less analytical facet of The Return of the King being just an ending of a story. And it is a magnificent ending to its story, one that relishes in its completeness. The tale is full, its ending earned and final. There’s even a sense that you get watching through the credits, as Annie Lennox’s “Into the West” plays (a song incidentally about passing away itself) over sketched images of each character at a time -as though their stories have gone into recorded legend -nothing left to add. And Jackson made the right call not to allude to anything from Tolkien’s apocrypha -a move that had it been stuck to would have improved his Hobbit movies considerably. Though it is readily available in the appendixes of the book, we don’t need to know about the lives of Sam and Merry and Pippin, Aragorn and Gimli and Legolas, after Frodo’s departure fully ends their tale. He was intelligent enough to recognize the value in a happily ever after.
The value in endings is something we don’t appreciate now, with so few movies or media entities of comparative cultural capital to The Lord of the Rings being interested in them. The franchise machine simply doesn’t allow it. Marvel could have concluded with Endgame, but chose to keep going and may now never achieve any kind of a closure. Star Wars, which had existed as a more or less completed trilogy at the time Jackson’s project began production, is leaning that way too. And Lord of the Rings itself has not been immune, with universe-extending and reboot projects -even Jackson’s Hobbit films can’t help but end on the allusion to this first trilogy rather than go out as its own self-contained story, which the book very much had been.
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It takes courage to end something, and today’s Hollywood almost entirely lacks courage. But in storytelling as in life The End is an important place to reach. And much as the end of a good story can make you sad, as I can personally attest The Return of the King has done time and time again, there is a joy inherent in that too; the recognition of the power that that story has had –emotionally, intellectually, artistically, and imaginatively. There’s a common maxim that states something along the lines of ‘don’t mourn what is lost, celebrate what was’. And that is the truth at the core of a good ending, the reason why it is imperative. Don’t ask for more. I would much rather a great complete story be retold than an unending one continue into monotony. And a story like The Lord of the Rings loses nothing in the retelling.
“The last pages are for you Sam.”
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With each passing year the ending of The Return of the King feels more and more special. And each ending it gives us successively is a testament to the joy in the story being finished. It is so artfully done and so sure in its convictions that it is never not a beautifully bittersweet thing to experience. The Lord of the Rings has meant a lot to me through my life, these final notes of the trilogy being no exception. There are few movies, few works of art that go out on such a high and have stuck with me for their beauty and themes like this has. I feel that my understanding of it, and the whole pervasiveness of endings as a major motif of this film specifically, have grown with time; and that has only made it more powerful.
I return again to that one part of it; that moment between the four hobbits where everything seems right in the world but for their nebulous place in it. Their journey has ended, they are home now -but they will carry for the rest of their lives their story, what it meant for them, and what they mean for each other. There is a solemnity to their silence, to their unique psychological state, as I pointed out before. But there can be gratitude and pride there as well. Their experience was a burden, but the totality of it, the ending of it was a gift.
The ending of The Lord of the Rings is a gift too. Let us carry it into another twenty years.
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