Blog/2026-02-21/LOTR Is The Denouement

Where I picked up the book the first time

When I was young, I picked up a book called The Two Towers while walking through the local lending library browsing bookshelves. At the time I thought it was wild, jumping right into the action with some guy called Boromir blowing his horn and promptly dying. Boy, this guy really threw you into it! It was only when I finished it that I realized I'd been reading the second book in the most famous high fantasy series of all time. I remember burning through it, unable to let it go till I was done at which point we ended up going back to borrow The Fellowship of the Ring and The Return of the King. What an epic tale! Full of adventure and stories. Incredible cinema!

Anyway, many years later I watched the movies and was similarly taken by how well they represented the story. There was a lot cut but doubtless that was necessary to make something for the big screen. There were no complaints from me. Around this time, I remember talking to a bigger fan than I was about the series and he told me the world of Tolkien was much bigger than all this. By the time The Children of Húrin was published I'd moved on from that world and didn't remember to come back, though I joked with this friend of mine about his die hard fandom.

Well, recently I went back to learn about Tolkien's work and found that the series I'd read was indeed much bigger than I'd described, and there was actually quite a bit of significance to the way it was written to be a relatively small battle at the end of a great war. Absent the context of the rest of the tales, it seemed grand and significant and letting it be that actually has made discovering that it wasn't so much more enjoyable!

The Tolkien Myth

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The short form of the LOTR myth is that the books we know of as the Lord of the Rings are chronicling a denouement of the major events of that world. Originally, the creator Eru Iluvatar created a bunch of spirit gods called the Ainur, through whose song a world called Arda (among other things) is made. Some of those spirits manifested themselves as either the Valar (archangels) or Maiar (angels). The former are far more powerful than the latter. The most powerful Vala, Melkor, then decides to sing discord into this world and all the evil stems from him and so on. Everyone promptly renames him the deservedly evil sounding Morgoth. Morgoth fights a bunch of other Valar, loses in a way that blows up part of the world, and is banished from normal existence. He has a sidekick Maia, Sauron, who is the main antagonist of the Lord of the Rings. This chap is working with Morgoth's infrastructure and tooling, and punches above his weight by using the rings, but ultimately any of the guys who want him to lose are way more powerful than him.

The Denouement

So the biggest fight of all has already happened, the bad guy got demolished (specifically in a way that the good guy is upset at the consequences of), and in a parallel to the denouement of LOTR where the Shire needs to be freed from the diminished Saruman, there is a fight between a small number of Maiar (Gandalf, Saruman, the eagles, et al.) vs the others (Sauron, and then also Saruman). The trilogy we read with stories of courage and redemption and glory are all sort of a side story to the main one. We read the story of Sauron's return as a dramatic moment but in the grander scheme it's more like the Battle of Bautzen from World War 2 - a momentary successful offensive by a diminished opponent whose defeat is nonetheless inevitable.

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 Tolkien's legendarium has this level of self-similarity. 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.