Editing Blog/2026-02-21/LOTR Is The Denouement (section)

== Why This Was Cool To Me ==

The whole story is the trope originator of the classic high-fantasy party traveling to destroy The Big Bad's McGuffin and bring him down. That's cool and it's a great story, but it always had this part at the end about traveling to The Shire and finding a fallen Saruman there ruling over it. Once again our heroes vanquish this old foe and peace is brought to the land. That always felt a bit strange to me to have that final epilogue where the hobbits must go fight at home as well. But now it makes sense to me.

The whole of [[wikipedia:Tolkien's legendarium|Tolkien's legendarium]] has this level of self-similarity<ref name=ss/>. We live the series of the Lord of the Ring as if it is the most important thing. But the Valar and Maiar who are greater beings lived Morgoth's war as that and this as an epilogue. Likewise, the hobbits of The Shire likely saw Saruman's reign as the great thing, but the Men, Dwarves, and Elves of Middle-Earth saw it as an epilogue. As you move from greater creatures to lesser, the same story is told on different scales.

That is pretty neat.