Tolstoy noodled his way to the end in War and Peace, right? Why shouldn’t doorstop righters be able to do the same?

I’m with S. C. Butler on the long middle of Deathly Hallows; it was like reading Frodo and Sam’s trip through Mordor, except that it seemed to go on several times as long, and with Frodo and Sam alternately turning into Gollum.

I run into this in gaming, incidentally. My practice is to hand around a prospectus listing possible games, pick something the players like, and run it for a planned length of time—normally two years—at the end of which I wind up the story and close down the setting. And this gets odd reactions from a lot of people who seem to expect a campaign to go on forever, and think that one that ends has failed. Of course, if you don’t plan for a termination, your campaigns probably do mostly end by failing. It took me a while to learn to work in this kind of frame, but I think my viewing games as participatory fiction may have helped.

Please forgive me.

Tolkien also made damn sure that the marriage of Aragorn is front and center with the delicate references to “my greatest hope,” etc. It is also not the endless wedding, just going on and on.

Finally, the farewells are heartrending. This is not an endless tying up the protagonist’s life with a big pink ribbon, and giving him everything he wants. Tolkien shows there is a cost to all of this and so it feels fresh and not like a long slow dribbling toward a (sort of) ending.

Also, I just went back and checked. From the end of the scene where Sam gets to hear the minstral sing about Nine Fingered Frodo and the Ring of Doom it is exactly seventy-four pages. Not hundreds of pages.

*Symmetry with the opening

*Making it clear that the War has had a real impact on the Shire, and vice versa, what with Saruman recruiting the Sackville-Bagginses to help provision his army of orcs

*Building up to the valedictory scene where Frodo, like the elves, goes off to the West, leaving Sam behind to go on with his life and to preserve the memory of what has been lost

I think that last is what Melinda is pointing at, too, and I’ve come increasingly to think that memory and regret are a central theme, perhaps the central theme, of the whole novel. So Sam’s memory and regret don’t seem to me to be intrusive, but to be the natural conclusion of the story; and in a way it makes Sam the real hero of the story.

Though it’s probably just as well that Tolkien’s friends talked him out of the epilogue. I’ve read it just lately, and it’s well written, but it has some of the same effect as the epilogue of Deathly Hallows. Putting it in really would have been going on too long.

I didn’t know about Tolkien’s epilogue to LOTR. Where can that be found? I’d love to hear more about how he was talked out of including it, too.

http://www.freewebs.com/memoirsoftheshire/epilogue.htm

for the epilogues. The story of his being talked out of including it can be found in The Company They Keep, a recently published book by Diana Pavlac Glyer (wife of well-known sf fan Mike Glyer) on the Inklings as a literary circle.

I wrote about the theme of memory in The Lord of the Rings at more length in an essay, “Simbelmynë: Mortality and Memory in Middle-Earth,” that’s up on my friend Bob Franson’s Web site:

www.troynovant.com

Glancing over it, I see that I did discuss Sam’s being left behind in Middle-Earth, at slightly more length, if you’re interested in seeing more.

Those hints that pay off later are what make reading so rewarding. On the movie front Michael Clayton did that really well with the image of the horses in the field tying back to the book his son was reading.

Walter Jon Williams does that kind of crunchy goodness really well too. You read something in chapter three, and then it’s back in chapter 27 to slap you up the side of the head. He does it that very well in his wonderful Praxis series.