Literary Devices in The Return of the King
Symbolism, Imagery, Allegory
Setting
Middle-earth: Gondor, Dunharrow, the Paths of the Dead, Pelargir, the Field of Cormallen, Isengard, Bree, the Shire, the Grey HavensIn The Fellowship of the Ring, we get this outward movement...
Narrator Point of View
The narrator of The Return of the King knows everything, from the names of the orcs that imprison Frodo (Shagrat and Gorbag) to the deep confusion Éowyn feels over her sudden attraction to Faramir...
Genre
The Return of the King has sword fighting, sorcery, and the Dead rising from their graves to fulfill an ancient pact with the living. Adventure? Absolutely. Plus, the whole Lord of the Rings trilog...
Tone
As The Lord of the Rings series progresses and we get involved in higher-stakes battles between good and evil, the tone of the storytelling itself changes. The Return of the King has the grandest,...
Writing Style
In The Return of the King, Tolkien goes to a lot of trouble to make his readers really feel how awful the experiences of Aragorn approaching the Black Gate or Frodo and Sam coming up on Mount Doom...
What's Up With the Title?
Return of the Jedi. Return of Jafar. Return of the Killer Tomatoes. There sure are a lot of movies with "Return" in the title, and they all have one thing in common: they are all sequels in popular...
What's Up With the Epigraph?
Here's the epigraph for The Return of the King, which, if you've read The Fellowship of the Ring and Two Towers, you're no doubt familiar with:Three Rings for the Elven-kings under the sky,Sev...
What's Up With the Ending?
We've always had a bit of a problem with the way The Return of the King ends. It seems like such a let-down: Frodo comes back to the Shire after helping to save all of Middle-earth from Sauron, and...
Tough-o-Meter
By now, if you are on the third book in the Lord of the Ring series, you have probably already learned how to follow Tolkien's maps and remember all the strange names and places in Middle-earth. So...
Plot Analysis
There are a bunch of plot lines in The Return of the King: Aragorn's adventures on the Paths of the Dead, Gandalf and Pippin's stay in Gondor, Éowyn's disguised battle with the Nazgûl and her ro...
Booker's Seven Basic Plots Analysis
Anticipation Stage and 'Call'Sure, they're on a Ring Quest, but at the end of the day, the whole Lord of the Rings series is all about overcoming monsters. There is a literal monster, Sauron, and...
Three-Act Plot Analysis
At the beginning of Book Six, Prince Charming—oops we mean Sam—manages to rescue Frodo from captivity in the orc watchtower at Cirith Ungol, even though Frodo's hair is nowhere near long enoug...
Trivia
In a letter to his son Christopher in 1944, Tolkien confirmed that the whole orc thing is a more general metaphor for the extreme evil of which men are capable: "Urukhai is only a figure of speech....
Steaminess Rating
Steaminess? What steaminess? There's no sex here, folks. None whatsoever.
Allusions
While there are plenty of influences on The Lord of the Rings from early English and Anglo-Saxon poetry (see our "In a Nutshell" section of The Hobbit learning guide), all of Tolkien's direct...