The chapter "The Scouring of the Shire", and a chapter-length narrative in the appendices, "The Tale of Aragorn and Arwen", have attracted discussion by scholars and critics.

Gandalf arrives at Minas Tirith to warn Denethor of the attack, while Théoden musters the Rohirrim to ride to Gondor's aid.

With that threat eliminated, Aragorn uses the Corsairs' ships to transport the men of southern Gondor up the Anduin, reaching Minas Tirith just in time to turn the tide of battle.

Together, Gondor and Rohan defeat Sauron's army in the Battle of the Pelennor Fields, though at great cost; Théoden is among the dead.

He leads an army of men from Gondor and Rohan, marching through Ithilien to the Black Gate to distract Sauron from his true danger.

A few years later, in the company of Bilbo and Gandalf, Frodo sails from the Grey Havens west over the Sea to the Undying Lands to find peace.

It tells that Sam gives his daughter Elanor the fictional Red Book of Westmarch – which contains the autobiographical stories of Bilbo's adventures at the opening of the war, and Frodo's role in the full-on War of the Ring, and serves as Tolkien's source for The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings (with Tolkien representing himself as a translator, rather than an epic novelist).

Gives hobbit genealogies – not only for Bilbo and Frodo's Baggins family, but also their relations the Tooks and Brandybucks, which connect them to Pippin and Merry.

In addition to outlines of the various languages in current use during the narrative, and mentioned or seen in the story, it discusses hobbits' names at length.

In a review for The New York Times, the poet W. H. Auden praised The Return of the King and found The Lord of the Rings a "masterpiece of the genre".

[5] The author Anthony Price, reviewing the novel for The Oxford Mail, called it "more than immense; it is complete", praising Tolkien's Middle-earth as "an absolutely real and unendingly exciting world".

In his view, the One Ring was destroyed "with terrifying logic", though he did not demand that the text end there, noting that the hobbits' return to the Shire put the larger events in perspective.

[8][7] The Scottish poet and critic Edwin Muir, who had praised The Fellowship of the Ring in 1954,[9] attacked the completed book in 1955 in The Sunday Observer as "a boy's adventure story".

[12][11][13] Although Tolkien denied that the chapter was an allegory for Britain in the aftermath of World War II, commentators have argued that it can be applied to that period,[14] with clear contemporary political references that include a satire of socialism,[15][16][17][18] echoes of Nazism, allusions to the shortages in postwar Britain, and a strand of environmentalism.

[19][20] According to Tolkien, the idea of such a chapter was planned from the outset as part of the overall formal structure of The Lord of the Rings, though its details were not worked out until much later.

The chapter was intended to counterbalance the larger plot, concerning the physical journey to destroy the One Ring, with a moral quest upon the return home, to purify the Shire and to take personal responsibility.

[23] Aspects of the tale discussed by scholars include the nature of love and death;[24][25] the balance Tolkien strikes between open Christianity and his treatment of his characters as pagan; and the resulting paradox that although Tolkien was a Roman Catholic and considered the book fundamentally Catholic, Middle-earth societies lack religions of their own.

[26] It has been noted also that the tale's relegation to an appendix deprives the main story of much of its love-interest, shifting the book's emphasis towards action.