Lord of the Rings

In The Hobbit the danger and the excitement reach a peak

when the forces of good seem about to 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 lines finally converge

near the end when all the characters are reunited as Aragorn

is crowned king of Gondor. Tolkien uses these shifts in

viewpoint to good effect, often ending his scenes as cliff-

hangers, slowly building the tension to its climax. But

trying to follow the different story lines as he jumps back

and forth from one to the other can be very difficult.

Tolkien doesn't guide you through them as he did in The

Hobbit. But he does give clues to help you put the pieces in

order. For example, when Tolkien returns to Sam and

Frodo in Book VI, he shows you that he's jumping back in

time by telling you what Merry, Pippin, and Aragorn are

doing at the same moment.

Many people have commented that The Hobbit is like a

simple fairy tale, whereas The Lord of the Rings is more

like a great epic poem of the past, such as The Odyssey of

Homer

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