Return of the King

My audio journey through Middle Earth has ended with great satisfaction.  Evil is defeated, the king gains the throne, the heroes win the day.  What a wonderful story.  Tolkien, in his brilliance, gives us the bad guys to hate--the bad guys in The Lord of the Rings are really, really bad--but he also gives us bad guys to relate to.  The story doesn't simply deal with the forces of evil on the empire level, but the forces of evil within us.

Of course, the clearest internal struggle, which runs through all three books, is the temptation to power that the ringbearers have to struggle against.  We saw how possession of the ring transformed Gollum; how Bilbo kept the ring for years without succumbing to evil, but not without escaping effects of the temptation; how Frodo (and, briefly, Sam) bent under the weight of the ring as it became more burdensome the closer they got to Mount Doom.

Other characters struggled against the power of Mordor.  In The Two Towers, Theoden, king of Rohan, was held under the spell of Wormtongue, Saruman's agent.  Gandalf broke the spell, and Theoden became a great leader in the War of the Ring.  Similary, Denethor, the Steward of Gondor (essentially the Stewards had acted as kings in the absence of the true king, Aragorn and his ancestors), secretly communicated with Sauron, hoping to become king.  He despair at not becoming king and his grief at the loss of Boramir, who was slain by orcs while defending Merry and Pippin, led him to succumb to Sauron's lies, ultimately driving him mad.

Finally, in a long sequence not portrayed at all in the movies, we see the power of evil take a foothold in the Shire.  After the destruction of the ring, the defeat of the forces of Sauron, and the coronation of  Aragon as king, the hobbits take their time returning home.  They stop by Isengard to check on things.  Treebeard and his entish friends have torn down Saruman's mechanistic, sterile projects and restored Isengard's former glory, and have kept Saruman and Wormtongue locked up in the tower of Orthanc.  However, Treebeard, the softy, eventually let them go, thinking they were powerless.  Gandalf had destroyed Saruman's staff, taking away much of his power, but, as Gandalf pointed out, he still has the power of his tongue.

Returning to the Shire, the hobbits discover that Saruman had used that power to establish a tyrrannical regime over the Shire.  Some power-hungry hobbits, aided by a large band of "ruffians," men who had taken on orc-like qualities, were ruling the Shire like petty dictators.  Many trees had been felled, houses torn down and replaced with blocky, grey shacks, mechanical mills belched smoke, and filth and clutter prevailed.  The good produce of the land had either dried up or been taken over by the "chief" and his gang.  After facing the heart of evil, the four returning hobbits would not tolerate the reign of evil, however petty, in their beloved Shire.  They lead a rebellion which quickly puts down Saruman's devices and begin to restore peace to the shire.

Most of us will never have to face down pure evil, like Frodo did, falling under the eye of Sauron, or like Aragon and his army did at the Black Gate of Mordor.  But the influence of evil always creeps into our lives, through our own greed, the lust for power, vanity, etc.  In The Lord of the Rings, the heroes of the story overcome evil by supporting each other, but working together, and by maintaining focussed integrity in the face of temptation.

These stories can be read on many different levels, by all different ages, with a wide range of interpretations.  I have said before, the audio performance on these CDs is brilliant, bringing the story and characters to life.  The Lord of the Rings rightly sits as one of the great works of 20th century literature.