The Return of the King

Good lord this book is boring.

I really liked Fellowship of the Ring. There were fun adventures and we got to meet interesting people and explore Middle Earth. The first half of The Two Towers is like this, too. But then it just gets bleak. And in this installment there's a whole lot of war followed by way too many sappy good byes. Seriously, this book takes longer to end than the movie does, which is pretty impressive.

If you like reading about war, then this book is great. There are epic battles and heroic moments. But that bores me. Not to mention that the prose comes across as biblical. I honestly can't remember if this happened in the earlier installments or if it was unique to this book. It could be the I was so disenchanted with the plot that the language was bothering me more. Or it could have really been different. Either way, this book was a struggle.

I honestly almost gave it up a few times. But I'm stubborn. I couldn't just not finish this book. And I also wanted to find out the answer to a decade-old argument I've been having with a friend.

See, back in the eighth grade, she and I read The Lord of the Rings at the same time. At the end, it's revealed that Frodo suffers an annual illness. I thought that this was a reminder of when the Nazgul King stabbed him atop Weathertop. She was convinced that it was from when Shelob stung him. Somehow we were never able to come to an agreement about this. The main thing that drove me through this book was a need to settle this once and for all.

You can imagine my glee when I came across this passage:

All that day he was silent. It was the sixth of October.
"Are you in pain, Frodo?" said Gandalf quietly as he rode by Frodo's side.
"Well, yes I am," said Frodo. "It is my shoulder. The wound aches, and the memory of darkness is heavy on me. It was a year ago today."
"Alas! there are some wounds that cannot be wholly cured," said Gandalf.

It turns out I was right all these years. The wound that bothers Frodo every year was the one inflicted by the Witch King's knife at the start of the book.

But it wasn't that long ago that this same friend posted on Facebook that she had been vindicated in her belief that it was Shelob. So I kept reading, wondering if there was more to the story. And of course there was more to the story the next March

So [Sam] was not at home in early March and did not know that Frodo had been ill. On the thirteenth of that month Farmer Cotton found Frodo lying on his bed; he was clutching a white gem that hung on a chain around his neck and he seemed half in a dream.

So Shelob's sting also causes Frodo yearly pain. And it turns out that my friend and I were both right all those years ago.

There are a whole lot of appendices at the end of this book. In fact, the take up nearly half of it. But I was so relieved that the book was finally over that I didn't even attempt to read them. I seem to remember feeling the same way when I was thirteen. I'm not sure I'll ever read the supplemental material. The story I already read was more than enough.