The Return of the King


The Return of the King is the third and final volume of J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, following The Fellowship of the Ring and The Two Towers. The story begins in the kingdom of Gondor, which is soon to be attacked by the Dark Lord Sauron.

Title and publication

conceived of The Lord of the Rings as a single work comprising six "books" plus extensive appendices. The original publisher split the work into three volumes, publishing the fifth and sixth books with the appendices into the final volume with the title The Return of the King. Tolkien felt the chosen title revealed too much of the story, and indicated he preferred The War of the Ring as a title.
The proposed title for Book V was The War of the Ring. Book VI was to be The End of the Third Age. These titles were used in the Millennium edition.
The Return of the King was in the end published as the third and final volume of The Lord of the Rings, on 20 October 1955 in the UK.

Contents

The volume contains a Synopsis for readers who have not read the earlier volumes. The body of the volume consists of Book V: The War of the Ring, and Book VI: The End of the Third Age. The volume ends with a set of Appendices and Indexes, varying in different editions.

Critical reception

The early book reviews, published in newspapers and journals in 1955 and 1956, are listed and summarised briefly, with a note on whether they are positive or negative, by George H. Thompson in Mythlore.
In a review for The New York Times, W. H. Auden praised The Return of the King and found The Lord of the Rings a "masterpiece of the genre".
Anthony Boucher praised the volume as "a masterly narration of tremendous and terrible climactic events", although he also noted that Tolkien's prose "seems sometimes to be protracted for its own sake".