The Lord of the Rings reread is done! And I have much to say...
So, right off the bat, one thing I didn't remember at all was Ghân-buri-Ghân, who guides the Rohirrim through the hidden path on the way to Minas Tirith. I loved him and his people and thought they were a great inclusion, it shows that as far as the Men go, it's not just Gondor and Rohan that have a problem with the likes of Sauron.
Speaking of people who have a problem with the likes of Sauron: Denethor, the Steward of Gondor. I mostly remembered him as the tomato-chewing madman from the films, and while I remembered he was more complex in the books (in part because he possessed a palantír), that was about the limit of my knowledge. I was surprised to discover a genuinely fascinating character who is probably one of my favourites in the series overall now, and a strong rebuttal to the charge that Tolkien's world is too black-and-white in terms of morality, because he lives in the grey areas. I liked the dynamic between him and Pippin, and thought it was hilarious how after Gandalf spent so long warning Pippin about Denethor, the fool of a Took swore himself to his service within five minutes. Good job, Pippin! Denethor's key moral failing seems to be, in the eyes of the story, that he succumbed to despair and lost faith in the fight against Sauron after it could no longer be won by the only way he saw (force of arms), and did not know that Frodo and Sam could still succeed.
Frodo and Sam...I think here is where the "Samwise Gamgee is the real hero of LOTR" starts to emerge, as he takes over as what is essentially the viewpoint character after Frodo got captured at the end of the last novel. His one-man siege of Cirith Ungol was amazing, and his sheer determination was very impressive afterwards. I liked how, after despising him for most of the story, and inadvertently ruining his almost-redemption, he finally takes pity on Gollum after knowing what it's like to bear the One Ring for a short while, and let him go. Gollum comes back, of course, and it's a good thing, too, because he saves the world.
Gollum's fall...I knew it went like this, and not how it did in the movie, where he and Frodo struggle and fall, but Frodo clings onto the mountain while Gollum keeps the Ring for the last five seconds of his life. I get why it was changed for the film, as Gollum accidentally doing a bit of an oopsie and tripping off the side of the Crack of Doom may have come off as anticlimactic, but I get what Tolkien was going for here as this was the result of all the mercy and pity showed to Gollum over the course of the story, and Gollum of course would never voluntarily destroy himself or the Precious (except in the alternate possibility Tolkien described in one of his letters where he did redeem himself, which I love as a what-if scenario), so by the logic of the story, it had to be Gollum and it couldn't be on purpose, so it had to be like this. I can't speak for one way or the other what's better, but I get both versions of Gollum's fall.
Speaking of anticlimaxes, the Scouring of the Shire! I loved this chapter and I feel like it needs a whole separate blog post just to cover it, but I'll go over the basics here. I liked how it took the whimsicality of the Shire and made it kinda chilling, like with the Shirriffs and the Rules and all that, so typical of The Hobbit but turned into something mean and nasty, like what Saruman has become. I wasn't expecting Saruman to show up slightly earlier in a preceding chapter as a wandering beggar who essentially yells some angry words at the hobbits and then leaves, and it might have been important for foreshadowing, but I thought it was unnecessary. I think it's good that it's not in the film, though, as this chapter can't be tacked onto the end of The Return of the King in a cinematic format...it'd need to be its own film, or a short film, at least, but I imagine that film, The Lord of the Rings: The Scouring of the Shire, would have been far less popular than the trilogy.
Anyway, rambling done. I loved rereading LOTR, and I'm nowhere near done rambling about Tolkien on the Internet. I'll be reading The Silmarillion for the first time soon, and I have so much more to ramble about when it comes to Denethor, Théoden, Saruman, Wormtongue, Pippin (okay, I'm essentially just rattling off my favourite characters now), and so on and so forth. I'll leave this post here, though. The Return of the King, like the preceding instalments, was fantastic, and I eagerly await delving further into Tolkien's legendarium...
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