Lord Of The Rings
...be overcome by the
forces of evil. In The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien builds to
two simultaneous peaks. One occurs at the point when
Sauron's forces sweep down on the small army led by
Aragorn at the gates of Mordor. The other occurs inside
Mordor, as Frodo struggles with Gollum on the edge of the
Crack of Doom, where the Ring is to be destroyed. Both
the war and the quest reach their resolution in the same
instant, when the Ring is destroyed and with it, Sauron's
power.
The fourth and final part of each story serves to wind things
down. The hero returns home, looking forward to comfort.
He finds instead that his home is threatened. But he has
grown through his experiences and is able to regain what is
his. Of course, there are many important differences between
the two works. The Hobbit follows the story through
Bilbo's eyes and tells of events in a chronological sequence.
In other words, you hear about things as they happen, rather
than jumping ahead to future events, or flashing back to
something that happened in the past. When Tolkien departs
from this chronological sequence in The Hobbit, he
carefully guides you through the jump in time: "Now if you
wish, like the dwarves, to hear news of Smaug, you must
go back again to the evening when he smashed the door
and flew off in a rage, two days before."
The story line of The Lord of the Rings, on the other hand,
is much more complicated. The Lord of the Rings is a
trilogy, consisting of three volumes (Parts One to Three)
divided into six sections (Books I through VI). The novel
jumps back and forth in time, following the stories of
several characters. The various story...
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