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+ July 18, 2025
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+ Climbing my personal Mount Doom (I finished reading Lord of the Rings)
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+ Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring released in 2001, when I was seven years old. At the time, my media diet consisted mostly of watching The Powerpuff Girls and obsessively reading and re-reading the first four Harry Potter books.Fellowship released on home media, we trucked to the neighborhood knock-off Blockbuster and rented it on VHS. That night, I crowded with my two older siblings around a (by today’s standards) laughably small tube TV and tucked in with no expectations or understanding of what the movie would be about.
+I would like to say that I was surprised and delighted by the mystical adventure, high fantasy setting, and well-sketched characters. Instead I was terrified by the scant glimpses of Gollum and suffered the first sleepless night inspired by a movie I can recall.
+Lord of the Rings -mania, of course, consumed the early 2000s, and I became ever-so-slightly less of a chickenshit. My siblings and I were obsessed with the films; we watched them obsessively and anxiously awaited each release. I don’t remember seeing Two Towers for the first time (though the scene of Aragorn opening the doors to Helms Deep is etched in my brain as a core memory), but we saw Return of the King in theaters. My dad took us, and I also spent a sleepless night after seeing that one, but my insomnia stemmed instead from violent puking fits after consuming way too much popcorn and Sierra Mist.
+At some point, my brother picked up the books to read. He and I both were avid young readers — again, at that point, mostly of Harry Potter and the ilkReturn of the King for me before the movie came out. Upon finishing the “Mount Doom” chapter, he excitedly asked me if I wanted to know how the series ended. I dithered, and he announced that the Ring was destroyed when Gollum took it from Frodo then fell into the cracks of Mount Doom.That’s stupid, I thought, hoping for a more epic conclusion to the saga.
+I had tried around age 10 to read the books, too — I started with Fellowship and skipped what I saw as the “boring” chapters (“Tom Bombadil,” “The Council of Elrond,”Two Towers a few times after, which I insisted was the best in the series
+I am here over twenty years later to correct the thought crimes and dishonesty of my childhood self: over the last decade, I have achieved a longstanding personal mission to, at last, read through all of — and skip no chapters in — The Lord of the Rings.
+In my teen and young adult years, I remained an avid fan of the movies — my partner and I bonded over watching them in our early relationship, but I would always have to reveal my secret shame in never actually cracking the covers of the books (especially as I attended college as an English and Education dual major). When I started subbing, then teaching, I knew I had to finish the books, as I could not submit myself to the mockery of twelve-year-olds who had read the books.
+I picked up Fellowship in probably 2018 or 2019 and breezed through it with relative ease,
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+I would read every chapter, even if they were boring. (Sorry, Tom Bombadil.
+I would read other things in between, to avoid burnout.
+I would skim or mostly skip the songs, which are also mostly boring and could, with a few exceptions, be edited out without any detriment to the reader’s experience.
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+I continued on through Two Towers and began to feel fatigue — I think this is less of a controversial take, but Tolkien needed an editor to help him better discover the balance between legitimate world-building and shit for nerds that should be relegated to footnotes and appendices. At one point, in the middle of the “Helm’s Deep” chapter — arguably the major climax of Aragorn’s plot in Book Three — I fell asleep while reading and it was not late at night. I took a few years’ break from the series after that, as I become busier and busier in my day job my patience eroded for reading about another field or flower or bloodline for pages upon pages.
+This year, however, as part of my resolution to read more , I was at my local bookshop and spotted a copy of Return of the King .
+I will plant my flag and say that I think Return of the King the best in the series; Tolkien beautifully weaves the interlaced narrative together here, which has enough tension and intersection to bear me through his purple prose about nature and unflagging world building with only minor grumbling. What especially struck me, however, was Frodo and Sam’s harrowing journey across Mordor — it was here that Tolkien’s penchant for detail clicked for me, as the reader is treated to an arduous accounting of every drop of water, every crumb of bread that Sam rations (and goes without) across the ashy wastelands of Mordor. By comparison, the destruction of the Ring seems to pas with relatively little fanfare. The movies portray it (and all) with bombastic melodrama (affectionate), from Sam’s protestation that he will carry Frodo the rest of the way to his rescue of Frodo as he dangles bloodily from a cliff above the fires of Mount Doom. The book instead centers Sam’s limited view of the events: he enters the cavern well after Frodo and sees Frodo slip on the Ring. The affair unfolds briskly from there (or perhaps it seems so when juxtaposed with the overwrought nature of Tolkien’s prose to that point). Indeed, the destruction of the Ring is communicated to the reader in just a few short sentences after Gollum bites off Frodo’s finger:
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+‘Precious, precious, precious!’ Gollum cried. ‘My Precious! O my Precious!’ And with that, even as his eyes were lifted up to gloat on his prize, he stepped too far, toppled, wavered for a moment on the brink, and then with a shriek he fell. Out of the depths came his last wail Precious , and he was gone.
+I am sure there is scholarship here on Tolkien’s choice in portraying the events — it certainly serves his other narrative themes to portray the actual destruction of the Ring as relatively minor compared to the journey to get there. Still, it’s almost comedic in how quickly and (intentionally) ridiculously it unfolds: not with some grand act of courage — that part is already passed — but with the folly of Gollum.
+One familiar with the movies might think this the relative end of the major events of Return of the King , not so: I knew the infamy of “The Scouring of the Shire” as an anti-climax and was excited to at last polish of the series, so I dreaded the approach of the chapter. While elements of it, too, are ridiculous (Sharkey, mainly), and less intentionally so than Gollum’s demise, its thematic importance looms large: Frodo’s anti-hero’s journey (in the Campbellian sense). Instead of pursuing and gaining a treasure as the classic heroes do, Frodo’s journey is instead the destruction of one. How, then, does Frodo achieve transformation into a better version of himself? “The Scouring of the Shire” explores what lies in the wake of war and victory, acknowledging the long process of rebuilding (on a macro-level, for Middle-earth as a whole) and rebirth (on a micro-level, for Frodo internally) that come after.
+The Scouring echoes Odysseus’s return to Ithaca and slaughter of the suitors, in many ways, to reclaim his throne, his wife, and his power, but where Odysseus enacts violent and bloody revenge, Frodo lays down all arms and implores others to do the same. Tolkien is not entirely committed to a pacifistic message, of course — that would be an inconsistent message after nearly 1000 pages of grand battles and acts of heroism on the battlefield — Frodo draws no blade, but Merry and Pippin do, which the narrative seems to acknowledge as a necessity in reclaiming the Shire. But while Odysseus’s brutality in reclaiming his kingdom is key to his ending — he shows his valor, even in old age and hardship, and an ally of the Gods — Frodo’s denouncement of revenge completes an idealistic vision of moral good: Frodo has witnessed and been tempted toward wretched, absolute power and turned against it.
+Of course, Frodo is also transformed from the trauma of his journey. From the forward of Fellowship onward, I found ludicrous Tolkien’s dogged insistence that the books have nothing to do with his experiences in war or the cultural milieu in which they were written. Frodo’s trauma is the plainest acknowledgement of this influence. I do not pretend to know Tolkien, his life or his biography, but Frodo’s anguish and inability to fully heal rings as one of the most realistic aspects of the series, grounding high fantasy in the painfully human. Even after the Shire is reclaimed, Frodo is haunted by all that he has seen and felt; he is ill and bedridden on the anniversaries of Weathertop and Mount Doom, psychosomatic (or perhaps mystical — this is Lord of the Rings , after all) anniversary reactions. This pairs beautifully with the hopeful and triumphant end of the Scouring episode: the reader experiences joy and celebration in seeing good and beauty restored to the Shire but catharsis through
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