![]() While hundreds of pages have been spent detailing the slow struggle over difficult terrain, the actual destruction of the Ring takes only one page, and the dissolution of Sauron, his armies, and his kingdom takes another page. The 18th century French term dénouement literally means “unknotting” or “unraveling,” and seems obviously appropriate to both comic and tragic endings, in which everything “comes apart” at the conclusion, in the senses both of “disintegrating” and “becoming clear.” What is the climax, culmination, or dénouement of The Lord of the Rings?įor over 800 pages we have followed Frodo and Sam in their journey from the Shire to the Crack of Doom, where they are to destroy the Ring. The word “culmination” comes from a Latin word meaning “top, gable, peak, summit,” and before the 18th century was more commonly used in astronomy for the position of a celestial body when it crosses the meridian. The word “climax” comes from a Greek word meaning “ladder,” and was used in the sense of “point of highest intensity” only through a late 18th century misunderstanding before that, it was a term in rhetoric referring to a sequence of propositions arranged in order of increasing effectiveness. In English there are several good words for the moment in a plot when everything “comes to a head,” the moment to which the entire previous action has been building up.
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