How Do You Keep Going After You've Been Through It? Lessons I'm Learning from the Last Chapters of The Lord of the Rings

What Tolkien is teaching me about peace after the fire and faithfulness after the fight

I’ve been reading The Lord of the Rings again. I’m at the end of The Return of the King, the final book in the trilogy, working through the remaining chapters after the Ring has already melted into the fire. As I’m reading, I’m struck by how much story remains (six more chapters!) after the climactic scene where the main conflict is resolved.

The world is saved, yet the story lingers.

Indeed, Tolkien spends roughly a hundred pages on what comes after the climax. Most modern stories wrap it up fairly quickly after the explosion or the kiss. Once the hero wins, the credits roll, the orchestra swells, and we’re told everything changed forever and for the better. Even Bilbo intended to close his own book with the line: And he lived happily ever after to the end of his days. But Tolkien doesn’t do that with The Lord of the Rings. He makes us walk home slowly.

That choice feels very human.

In life, our battles, whatever they might be, rarely end with fireworks. They end with scars, slow rebuilding, small acts of restoration, and in strange silence. Tolkien knew from experience that wars end, but that wounds don’t heal at the same pace.

So, when the Ring is destroyed, evil might collapse under its own weight, but the world doesn’t suddenly become good. Gondor is in ruins and Middle-earth bears deep and permanent scars. The victors are exhausted. Aragorn’s coronation as the returning king is, for all intents and purposes, a healing act more than it is a coronation.

“The hands of the king are the hands of a healer,” Tolkien writes, “and so shall the rightful king be known.”

Reading that, I thought about how our own battles often feel unfinished after they’re done. You can walk through something that feels like the battle of your life and still find that peace doesn’t arrive on schedule. The Christian imagination understands this tension instinctively, I think. Salvation is the turning of the tide instead of the end of the work. The capital “K” King must still return and make all things new.

The scene that weighs on me the most might be The Scouring of the Shire. The hobbits return home expecting peace, only to find their country corrupted and industrialized. The cozy fields are fenced off, the inns are closed, and the air and water smell and taste of smoke. The shadow has crept even here.¹ As Tolkien writes,

“Many of the trees had been felled and not replaced, and everywhere there was a feeling of work ill-done and unnecessary. The new mill was large and noisy. Smoke poured from its tall chimney, and the stench of it made the air heavy.”

It’s probably one of the more moral passages Tolkien ever wrote. Victory in Mordor didn’t make the Shire (literally on the other side of the map) safe. Perhaps that’s an insight our age could use. We often imagine evil as a dragon on the horizon, something far away and big and dramatic. And, indeed, there are dragons to be slain. But Tolkien reminds us that evil can also be a broken gate, a cruel foreman, or the slow poisoning of a stream in our own neighborhood.

But I think it’s even deeper than that.

The battle for goodness doesn’t end in the realm of kings and dragons. It continues in the fields where we live and, more importantly, because of the battle’s aftermath, in the harder ground of our own hearts.

I think this is what Frodo’s final journey to the Grey Havens is all about, a scene that’s never sat right with me until now. He tells Sam he can’t stay because his wounds, both spiritual and physical, haven’t healed. “I have been too deeply hurt, Sam. I tried to save the Shire, and it has been saved—but not for me,” Frodo tells Sam. I don’t know if a truer line exists in all of human-written literature. The Shire is saved, but he can’t find rest in it. So he sails away, and the story ends. It’s not exactly a heroic ending.

Tolkien seems to be saying that some hurts can’t be mended on this side of the sea. My pastoral mind makes me think Frodo’s scars aren’t unlike the risen Christ’s wounds, signs that the end of the battle doesn’t erase suffering. I find that deeply honest. It’s a mercy that leaves room for those who still ache after the battle and long for the undying lands. Even after all the wars and wanderings, the world might be on the mend, but it’s never really the same. I feel this in my bones.

This brings us to the final words of the book, which aren’t about kings or elves or prophecies. They belong, of all people, to the gardener Sam Gamgee, standing in the doorway of his home: “Well, I’m back.”

It’s an almost laughably plain sentence to conclude such a historically vast and wonderful tale, yet it carries the full weight of the entire epic. Sam has faced monsters and marched to the edges of despair, and now his reward is a return to the ordinary, though not as it was before. He sees it with new eyes, which can only come from the battle. His home is the same, but he isn’t. Sam’s vision has deepened and sobered; he’s seen death and darkness up close and now sees the world as it is—fallen, beautiful, and fragile—and loves it still.

That, too, feels distinctly Christian. The incarnation sanctifies the everyday: the table, the back porch, and the laughter of children. Sam’s benedictory line reminds me of when Jesus invited the disciples to have breakfast with Him after the battle of the cross (Jn 21:12).² Indeed, John’s Gospel doesn’t end in a palace but on a beach with bread and friends.

That breakfast must have tasted different after everything they had endured, the bread made sweeter by the battle, the fire more welcome because of the night they had come through.

Jesus said to them, ‘Come and have breakfast.’ (Jn 21:12)

As I close the book, I’m thinking about how rare it is for stories today to slow down like this. We like conclusions that resolve cleanly. We want the villain to vanish and the hero to smile and for the battle to be over and for everyone to live happily ever after. Tolkien offers something truer. His ending teaches us that life after the battle isn’t very heroic.

The Ring may be gone, but the work of mending remains. The fields still need tending. The wounds still need grace. The home still needs guarding. And the heart needs time to heal, though it won’t fully rest until we sail to the Grey Havens.

And in that slow return from Mordor, Tolkien shows us what life looks like after the battle: not the end of struggle so much as the beginning of peace that can only come from a battle well fought, win or lose. The scars remain, but they remind us that peace is something we tend, not something we win.

1. After his defeat at Isengard, Saruman is released by Treebeard and slinks north taking control of the Shire through Lotho Sackville-Baggins who’d been buying up property under Saruman’s influence. By the time Frodo and the hobbits return, the countryside has been industrialized and polluted by “ruffians” in Saruman’s employ. Saruman, now known as Sharkey, represents evil in its final form of power turned to spite and domination reduced to desecration (The Return of the King, Book VI, Chapter 8, The Scouring of the Shire).

2. Tolkien coined the word eucatastrophe to describe “the sudden happy turn in a story which pierces you with a joy that brings tears.” In On Fairy-Stories he called the Incarnation and Resurrection “the greatest eucatastrophe of human history,” where sorrow and joy meet and goodness has the final word.