Original subtitles

[music playing]

NARRATOR: It is the greatest myth of modern times,

an evil ring of power and an unlikely hero on a mission

to destroy it.

"The Lord of the Rings" is a world filled with warriors,

wizards, and monsters, all created in the mind of one man.

But there is more to it than imagination.

The story has a series of intriguing connections

to reality, from the trenches of World War I to the Bible.

Now, discover the facts behind the fiction.

This is the real story of "The Lord of the Rings."

[music playing]

[heartbeat]

NARRATOR: A Lone figure teeters on the edge of an abyss,

gazing into the fiery pool of lava below.

Here, the long, arduous journey of Frodo Baggins

has come to an end, a mission to destroy an evil ring by casting

it into the same fires from which it was forged.

This is the quest at the heart of "The Lord of the Rings."

[music playing]

NARRATOR: It is a classic story of good versus evil,

unfolding in a world called Middle Earth.

COREY OLSEN: There's something about "The Lord of the Rings"

that is able to speak to people.

And I think that that has a lot to do with its connection

to mythology.

[music playing]

NARRATOR: Behind "The Lord of the Rings,"

there are a number of ancient and modern influences

that combine to create the most ambitious mythological journey

since "The Odyssey."

All of them are channeled through one man--

author JRR Tolkien.

Tolkien famously wrote a letter

saying that he wanted to create a mythology for my country.

He was trying to produce a mythology that was truly

English, that was centered around the North and West,

rather than around the Mediterranean

Sea like the Greek and Roman had been.

And since it didn't exist, he figured

he would have to write it.

NARRATOR: To create his mythology,

Tolkien drew from his own experiences

in the modern world as well as his favorite stories

from the ancient world.

TROY STORFJELL: He broke down many different mythologies

and medieval traditions, then refashioned

them to create his own mythos.

SCOTT MELLOR: Tolkien was really using

a lot of the mythological elements from old English

and from the old Norse material.

NARRATOR: Beowulf, King Arthur, the Viking sagas,

all our sources behind "The Lord of the Rings."

The ancient connections begin with the setting of the story.

In Norse mythology, the world is made up of three levels.

The highest is Asgard, dwelling place of the gods.

The lowest is hell, underworld of the dead.

Between the two lies the world inhabited by elves, dwarves,

and men.

It is called Midgard, which translates as Middle Earth.

MICHAEL DROUT: Middle Earth is the Midgard

that we've encountered in old Norse or Middangeard

in Anglo-Saxon.

And it's simply in those contexts means the Earth

in the middle between the sky and hell surrounded

by the ocean.

NARRATOR: In "The Lord of the Rings,"

it is through Middle Earth that Frodo must travel

to destroy the evil ring.

This ring is the central focus of the story.

And it too is inspired by earlier legends.

"The Lord of the Rings" centers on 20 magical rings

found in Middle Earth.

Some of them offer healing.

Others can extend life.

But one is more powerful than all the others.

It is called the One Ring.

SCOTT LEONARD: It has the ability

to make the new wearer invisible when they put the ring on.

NARRATOR: A ring that can make someone invisible,

it is a concept that plays a key role

in "The Lord of the Rings."

But it didn't begin there.

It can also be found in a most legendary tale of the Middle

Ages, another story of courage in a time of peril--

King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table.

DIMITRA FIMI: In the Arthurian legend

there are magical objects.

And there is actually a case of a ring of invisibility

that the Maiden Luned give to the Knight Owain.

NARRATOR: It's an intriguing parallel

between two myths created more than 1,000 years apart.

But Frodo's ring does more than make its wearers invisible.

It also corrupts them.

The One Ring is a creation of an evil lord, who imbued it

with his own destructive power, Sauron.

DIMITRA FIMI: When Sauron forged the ring,

he put part of himself in it.

It's intrinsically evil.

If you wear it and claim it, you cannot use it for any good

cause.

It is going to twist everything you do for evil.

[music playing]

MICHAEL DROUT: The One Ring actually

has a malevolent spirit, part of Sauron's spirit,

living inside of it.

And so this malevolent spirit works on people to change them,

to manipulate them, to do evil things.

And the ring acts as an addiction.

The longer you have it, the more you desire.

It's like a bottomless pit.

NARRATOR: This idea of an evil ring also has

a mythical precedent in an old Norse epic called the Volsunga

saga.

DIMITRA FIMI: Many of the Norse sagas

are based on family histories.

And we find this very engaging combination

of historical material and mythological traditions.

TROY STORFJELL: The saga of the Volsungs

is an Icelandic saga, written sometime probably in the 1300s,

based on old Germanic tradition.

It treats a set of Germanic cultural heroes, based loosely

on historical figures that existed in pre-medieval times,

the end of the West Roman Empire.

These heroes and the epic poems about them were very important

in the Germanic warrior courts.

When the Scandinavians settled Iceland,

they took this tradition with them.

NARRATOR: There are some intriguing parallels

between the Volsunga saga and "The Lord of the Rings."

In one scene of the saga, a king possesses a golden ring

that gives him unimaginable wealth and riches.

But the king's son wants it for himself.

And the temptation drives him over the edge.

[music playing]

NARRATOR: He kills his father to claim the ring,

then takes it and hides in a cavern.

There, the evil ring transforms the prince

into a hideous serpent.

It's a harsh lesson in the danger

of greed, one that echoes in "The Lord of the Rings."

JOHN DAVENPORT: This is in some ways

quite similar to Gollum in "The Lord of the Rings."

MICHAEL DROUT: Gollum was a hobbit originally.

One day, he and his friend Deagol went fishing.

And Deagol sees something glinting

in the bottom of the river.

He pulls it out.

It's the ring.

And it's so beautiful, but Gollum, whose name was Smaegol

at that time, wants the ring.

He's so greedy about the gold, that he murders his best

friend.

[music playing]

NARRATOR: Gollum takes the ring and hides in a cavern,

just like the prince in the Volsunga saga.

TROY STORFJELL: He transforms into this hideous, long-lived,

but very pathetic creature.

JOHN DAVENPORT: Gollum's entire life

is spent dwelling on the fact that he possesses this ring

and obsessing with it.

It's completely taken over his mind.

[music playing]

NARRATOR: After possessing the ring for nearly 500 years,

Gollum loses it.

Some time later, it ends up in the hands of an innocent hobbit

named Frodo Baggins.

MICHAEL DROUT: Frodo, who has an interesting name, because it

means wise in old Norse and Anglo-Saxon,

and Frodo is the one who gets stuck with the ring.

NARRATOR: Frodo's journey begins in the land of rolling hills

and green fields called the Shire.

This is the home of his race, the hobbits.

MICHAEL DROUT: Hobbits are a little people, probably 4 feet

or shorter.

They don't wear shoes because they have very thick souls

on the bottom of their feet and lots of fur

on the top of their feet.

They're sort of home bodies.

They don't ever really go in for adventures.

NARRATOR: The slow pace of life in the Shire mirrors author JRR

Tolkien's own childhood in the countryside of western England.

TROY STORFJELL: In some ways, Tolkien must have put himself

into the Hobbit.

Many of his ideals are embodied in the Hobbits

as sort of embracing the rural ideal,

embracing the simple, pastoral life,

common, good old-fashioned virtues in the face of grandeur

and pretension.

NARRATOR: A hobbit is the last creature one might expect

to save the world from evil.

But Frodo Baggins is different.

Frodo is not a typical hobbit, because he's learned.

He's interested in elves and dwarves and outsiders.

And he knows a little bit about the world.

And he cares about the outside world enough to sacrifice

everything he actually loves.

SCOTT MELLOR: If you go back to these original myths,

you're looking at the heroes themselves, the warriors,

if you will.

Tolkien then takes this story, and he tells it

from the point of view of a not likely hero,

the reluctant warrior.

And that, I think, is rather unique.

NARRATOR: Frodo inherits the One Ring from his uncle, Bilbo,

who found it in Gollum's cave.

When he discovers the ring's destructive power,

he sets out to destroy it.

But he soon finds himself being drawn in by its evil.

DIMITRA FIMI: The beginning of the book,

he already starts feeling the temptation of maybe putting

the ring on and escaping, leaving his friends behind.

He passes the test at that stage.

But later on, the addiction becomes worse and worse.

NARRATOR: Frodo's quest to destroy evil

is the heart of "The Lord of the Rings."

But the myth of Middle Earth doesn't begin there.

This is only its final chapter.

[music playing]

NARRATOR: In 1977, more than 20 years after "The Lord

of the Rings" was first published,

its forgotten blueprint emerged, ,

revealing for the first time how the most ambitious myth

of the modern era really begins.

It's a creation story with intriguing ties

to the Christian Bible.

[music playing]

[music playing]

NARRATOR: "The Lord of the Rings"

is a modern myth with direct connections to history's most

legendary tales.

JRR Tolkien's mythological world is so detailed,

he even created a word to describe it--

mythopoeia.

By this, he meant a whole mythic place, that

was a whole world, very populated,

with a whole geography, and a whole ability to map it.

If you wanted an example in the modern period,

you would look at the world created

with "Star Wars," for example.

NARRATOR: Tolkien's mythopoeia even had a creation story

to explain how Middle Earth came into existence before "The Lord

of the Rings."

But it wasn't published until after his death in a book

called "The Silmarillion."

This was the blueprint for Middle Earth.

All the ancient backstory to "The Lord of the Rings,"

all the things that had happened thousands of years

before, more than 2 feet thick, huge pile of papers,

poems written in elvish and English and histories.

And the publishers were like, we have

no idea what to do with this.

NARRATOR: Tolkien drew from many sources

as he set out to create his own mythical world.

But there was one that influenced it

above all others--

the Bible.

MICHAEL DROUT: Tolkien was an extremely devout Roman Catholic

for reasons of personal faith and also for family history.

His mother converted to Catholicism.

And when she did, her family sort of disowned her.

She raised her two children Catholic,

and then she died of diabetes when Tolkien was very young.

He was adopted by a Roman Catholic priest, who took care

of him and his brother.

So the whole work is informed by Catholic thought.

JOHN DAVENPORT: And that shows through in his stories

in some interesting ways, especially

in creation stories and the role that the creator plays there.

NARRATOR: In Tolkien's story there is one supreme god,

called Iluvatar.

He creates angelic beings called the Ainur, who

sing songs so beautiful that the world springs forth from them.

JOHN DAVENPORT: The world is created

in a kind of giant symphony, or music, of the Ainur

as it's called.

And in singing their song before the throne of God,

they map out the whole history of the world that's to come,

which God then makes real.

NARRATOR: This is the beginning of Middle Earth,

the future setting of "The Lord of the Rings."

By 1928, Tolkien had quietly sketched out the framework

of his mythology.

He didn't expect it to be seen beyond his close circle

of friends.

But then a spark of inspiration hit that would transform him

from a 36-year-old college professor

into the modern master of myth.

The famous story is he was grading exams.

A student had left a page blank.

And Tolkien wrote on it, "In a hole in the ground,

there lived a hobbit."

NARRATOR: From this one sentence,

a whole new world would open up.

JOHN DAVENPORT: He had no idea what it meant and started

to develop this story from that.

There may not be any very clear linguistic precedents

for the word hobbit.

Nevertheless, if you think about it,

it sounds quite like the word habit

or in the earlier Latin habitus, a creature

of habit, a creature that's set in its ways,

living a very ordinary existence.

NARRATOR: Wordplay was nothing new for Tolkien.

He began inventing his own phrases as a child.

They became the foundation for the many languages spoken

in "The Lord of the Rings," especially

the language of the elves.

The elves are not to be confused with hobbits.

They are a race of near perfect immortal beings, who represent

a vision of what humans would be like had they not been tainted

by the original sin of Adam and Eve.

The elves speak in several distinct dialects

and have the most fully developed

of Middle Earth's languages.

Some parts of the elvish language

are based on a real one--

Finnish.

Tolkien learned it while studying the national myth

of Finland, called the Kalevala.

SCOTT LEONARD: The Kalevala is the epic of the Finnish people.

It includes dwarves and elves.

And so in that way, it has characters

that resonate and perhaps inspired some

of Tolkien's later writings.

JOHN DAVENPORT: Languages of other creatures also, they'll

play an important role in the story.

Even the language of that Black Speech spoken by Sauron

gives you a sense of his ethos, of the nature of his being.

So the languages of each of these different races

tells you something about their nature.

NARRATOR: In "The Lord of the Rings,"

another language belongs to the dwarves,

a short, stout group of characters

who live underground.

Their alphabet is inspired by Norse inscriptions that

can still be found in Scandinavia

on ancient memorials called rune stone.

JOHN DAVENPORT: Runes were often used

to mark objects of great significance,

for example, swords that would be passed down as heirlooms,

sometimes burial sites.

Sometimes we have in runic writing

short riddles that provide an extra problem

for their interpreters.

First, you have to read the runic alphabet.

Then, you have to figure out what the riddle means.

NARRATOR: Tolkien added a runic riddle

to his first published novel, the epic precursor

to "The Lord of the Rings"--

'The Hobbit."

It centers on Bilbo Baggins, Frodo's uncle,

a hobbit in search of stolen treasure.

The clue to finding it is on an ancient map.

It is a hidden runic text that can only be seen in moonlight.

MICHAEL DROUT: Tolkien actually wanted

to make the runes be representative

of a real language.

It was an idea of secret writing, of magic writing,

but also, it was connected with his invented languages.

NARRATOR: The magic writing on the map

leads Bilbo to the liar of Smaug, the most dreaded dragon

in Middle Earth.

This is the monster who holds the treasure.

Smaug is the last of the great golden dragons.

And he gathered up all the wealth

from the dwarfish kingdom and piled it up into a huge mound.

DIMITRA FIMI: Dragons represent human greed,

but really amplified, because this monstrous creature, whose

only interest is in gathering gold and keeping it.

NARRATOR: Bilbo bravely enters the dragon's lair

and steals a golden cup from its horde.

In retaliation, Smaug angrily attacks a nearby village.

[wings flapping]

[roar]

[screaming]

[music playing]

NARRATOR: This is the myth.

But what inspired it?

If the story of a dragon who guards a hoard of gold

sounds familiar, there is a good reason.

The plot of this incident is almost

identical with the incident in "Beowulf."

NARRATOR: "Beowulf," one of the most famous myths

in human history and one that was a favorite of JRR Tolkien.

It is the story of a Scandinavian hero who

becomes king of his homeland and faces the ultimate test--

a fire breathing dragon.

SCOTT LEONARD: The dragon is guarding a treasure

from kings of a previous age.

A slave discovers a secret passageway down

into the dragon's lair, finds this fabulous treasure,

sees the sleeping dragon, and creeps in and steals

a gold cup.

NARRATOR: It's a tale with obvious similarities

to the story in "The Hobbit."

Both are allegories about the danger of greed.

In each case, a desire for treasure

sets off a chain reaction of horrific consequences.

Tolkien has taken that from "Beowulf"

and made it into one of the crucial centerpieces

of his entire story.

NARRATOR: "Beowulf" is one of many written sources

that had a major impact on "The Lord of the Rings."

But there was a real life experience

that shaped the story more than anything pulled

from the pages of a book--

a terrifying trauma laden with ghosts, blood, and death--

the battle scarred trenches of World War I.

[music playing]

NARRATOR: France, 1916, a barrage of enemy

fire rattles an Allied trench.

A group of British soldiers scramble for safety, crawling

like worms, inch by inch.

Among them is 24-year-old Second Lieutenant JRR Tolkien,

future author of "The Lord of the Rings."

His experiences in war will have a profound influence

on the mythical battle for Middle Earth.

THOMAS FINAN: When read "The Lord of the Rings"

and we read about the battles and we read

about the bloodiness and we read about the destruction

of nature, it is a statement about war.

NARRATOR: World War I was a scene of death on a scale that

defies belief.

The history books call it The Great War,

a time when men slaughtered each other over mere yards of mud.

THOMAS FINAN: Tolkien and the people of his generation

that experienced World War I experienced a brutality

and warfare that was unique, not to say that warfare itself

isn't bloody or violent.

Just the trench warfare in northern France

was particularly gruesome.

TRACEY-ANNE COOPER: It was waiting around

to see if you were going to be hit by an artillery shell.

It was having your feet in so much trench water

that you developed a condition called trench foot, in which

the flesh just slid off your bones.

It was being attacked by mustard gas.

And all this Tolkien would have seen.

NARRATOR: Lieutenant Tolkien sees action

in the Battle of the Somme, a brutal stalemate

that results in carnage on a scale

never seen in human history.

TRACEY-ANNE COOPER: The Battle of the Somme

raged for four months, each side losing 1 and 1/2 million men.

Nobody gained or lost an inch at the end of that battle.

It was just a tragic waste of lives.

SCOTT LEONARD: After serving for approximately a year or so,

Tolkien developed trench fever in the form of dysentery

or typhus and was hospitalized and taken home,

and it took him a very long time to recover.

And he actually never returned to the war.

TROY STORFJELL: He was damaged, wounded internally by the war

and traumatized.

The trauma that he had suffered had

to have influenced the way he wrote about the trauma

that Frodo experiences in his quest to destroy the ring.

Much of Tolkien made its way into the hobbits

without them being a thinly disguised Tolkien.

[music playing]

NARRATOR: In "The Lord of the Rings," the hobbit

Frodo travels through a bog called the Dead Marshes, where

a great battle had taken place thousands of years earlier.

There, ghosts are still lurking beneath the waterline.

MAN (VOICEOVER): They lie in all the pools.

Pale faces, deep, deep under the dark water,

I saw them, grim faces, and evil and noble faces and sad,

but all foul, all rotting, all dead.

DIMITRA FIMI: In the dead marshes, where you have

this kind of rotting landscape with bodies of an older war,

you definitely get these memories of the Somme,

of the trenches, of these rotting bodies of soldiers.

This is not anymore the idea of a heroic war.

This is the death and devastation.

What is left really is just dead men.

NARRATOR: The horrors of war were first

exposed in the precursor to "The Lord of the Rings"--

"The Hobbit."

The story culminates in a battle of five different armies, all

vying for the dragon's treasure.

The main character, Bilbo Baggins,

sees many of his companions killed on the battlefield

and comes to understand the futility of war.

Like Bilbo, Tolkien himself watched

his companions die in battle.

In France, he fought alongside three of his oldest and closest

friends.

But by November of 1916, two of them were dead.

SCOTT LEONARD: It seems obvious when one reads the story where

you have comrades in arms facing a seemingly insurmountable foe

and the fear that they feel and the sounds of the battle

approaching, they know they're going to be tested and probably

die that night and so on.

And yet, the way they find a way to express both humor

and courage and to keep each other's spirits up

in a time like that seems to be drawn directly from his battle

experience.

[music playing]

NARRATOR: The misery and terror of World War

I reflected not only in the suffering of Middle Earth's

heroes, but in the ruthlessness of its villains.

Perhaps nowhere is Tolkien's war experience more powerfully

revealed than in the horrific evil of the Orcs.

[music playing]

NARRATOR: "The Lord of the Rings"

is the work of a vivid imagination, rooted

in ancient myth and modern life.

The first-hand war experience of its author, JRR Tolkien,

framed its central conflict between good and evil forces.

The final battlefield in that conflict is an infernal hell--

Mordor.

At the heart of Mordor lies Mount Doom, the volcano

where the One Ring was forged.

This is where the hobbit Frodo must

come to destroy the ring before its evil power overcomes him.

It is a setting drawn from one of the world's most well-known

ancient sources--

the Bible.

HELGA LUTHERS: If we look at the Bible,

hell has been described as this place of fire and brimstone

and eternal torment.

And when we see Mordor, we see this place

of this black wasteland.

MICHAEL DROUT: It's got very close connections

with Dante's description of hell, in that there's

the burning plain in hell, the dry desert with the flakes

of fire falling from the sky.

NARRATOR: Even Mordor's name has a sinister ring to it.

This is no accident.

HELGA LUTHERS: Mordor actually sounds similar to morthur

in Anglo-Saxon.

It means morth, or it means a murder.

We also have the connection to the old Norse morth, literally

same thing, meaning murder.

[music playing]

NARRATOR: In the story, those who enter Mordor

are as good as dead.

It is patrolled by a race of ruthless foot soldiers, known

as orcs.

HELGA LUTHERS: Orcs are very horrible.

They are bent. They are crooked.

They are ugly.

We are told they are actually elves gone wrong.

The dark forces have taken and twisted

into this horrible race.

TROY STORFJELL: They are described as creatures

fascinated with machines, fascinated with making

clever things, fascinated with profit,

who try to get other people to work for them.

This has been read as sort of a thinly disguised capitalist

or capitalism, the orcs as capitalists.

COREY OLSEN: Orcs are completely corrupted.

They are ruined.

They were good creatures originally,

but their wills are set entirely on evil.

NARRATOR: Mordor's even race, like so many components

of "The Lord of the Rings," may derive from an ancient myth.

MICHAEL DROUT: In line 512 of "Beowulf,"

there is a description of all the evil creatures that

have been descended from Cain after Cain killed his brother

Abel.

And those are [non-english speech] And that

is ettins and elves and orcneas.

THOMAS FINAN: The orcneas are demon-like beings in "Beowulf."

They have a spirit-like quality.

But they're considered like an evil spirit being.

NARRATOR: Historical sources inspired

not only Middle Earth's most despised fiends,

but also one of its principal heroes--

the wizard Gandalf.

In "The Lord of the Rings," Gandalf

guides Frodo in his quest to destroy the One Ring.

SCOTT MELLOR: Gandalf has become an archetype for wizards

after the writing of "The Lord of the Rings."

Prior to that, magic was considered bad, anti-Christian.

It was a little bit evil.

Gandalf, I think, is a solid, good figure.

He really tries to do what's best for all the creatures

of Middle Earth.

NARRATOR: Clues about Gandalf's origins

can be found in Norse mythology.

In the old Norse, Gandalf means magical elf,

or magic using elf.

Of course, Gandalf is not an elf.

But he is certainly a magical figure of great power.

NARRATOR: But Gandalf draws more than his name from Norse myth.

His appearance is modeled after its most powerful deity--

Odin.

To the ancient Scandinavians, Odin represented many things.

He was a god of wisdom, war, battle, and death.

But it is his role as the wanderer that

echoes most clearly in Gandalf.

TROY STORFJELL: It's clear that Odin inspired Gandalf.

One of his aspects is the god of masks and many identities.

And so he has many names, hundreds

of names and disguises.

And when he travels on Earth, he often

travels as the Gray Wanderer.

He wears a gray robe.

He has a wide brimmed hat.

He has a long beard.

And all of these things fit very well with Gandalf.

NARRATOR: Like Odin, Gandalf roams Middle Earth for years,

quietly working to destroy its evil forces.

But the wizard may also be influenced by another more

prominent ancient figure.

Gandalf has also been compared by some people to Jesus.

He sacrifices himself, is dead, and comes back clothed

in white.

As Gandalf battles to save Frodo,

he metaphorically dies and is resurrected

as Gandalf the White.

And this is one of the instances where we can see Tolkien's

Catholic roots.

NARRATOR: A pagan god of many disguises

and a Christian savior who was resurrected,

two powerful figures from the ancient world, both

seen in one main character.

HELGA LUTHERS: This is what is so unique for Tolkien.

He is very good at bringing together Christian and pagan

motif.

NARRATOR: The religious influences behind "The Lord

of the Rings" are fully revealed in the climax of the epic.

As the story concludes, it is not Gandalf,

but Frodo who is in a position to save the world.

The myth's defining moment will draw from a pivotal chapter

in the life of Christ, as Frodo faces the last temptation

of the ring.

[music playing]

[roaring flames]

NARRATOR: Mordor, a fiery hell, home to the orcs

and the evil Lord Sauron.

This is where the hobbit Frodo finds himself

at the end of a painful journey across Middle Earth.

His quest to reach Mount Doom is over.

But his real test is about to begin.

To destroy the One Ring, Frodo must scale the mountain

and drop it into the volcanic fires, from which it

was forged.

But the ring won't go quietly.

It's no accident that the symbol is a circle.

It sucks in everything good about you

and about your personality, just like any other kind

of addiction, until all you can think about is the ring.

NARRATOR: As Frodo climbs Mount Doom,

the ring draws him in, challenging

him to abandon his mission and give in to its power.

It is the ultimate battle with temptation,

an internal struggle between darkness and light,

inspired by author JRR Tolkien's Christian worldview.

MICHAEL DROUT: The whole work is informed by Catholic thoughts.

The very end Tolkien said was illustrating the last two

petitions of the Lord's Prayer.

It says, lead us not into temptation,

but deliver us from evil.

NARRATOR: Frodo's final moments with the ring parallel one

of the most famous passages in the New Testament.

THOMAS FINAN: Satan comes to Earth

to tempt Christ in the desert while Christ

is fasting for 40 days.

He tempts him with power.

He tempts him with food.

He tempts him with dominion over Earth.

NARRATOR: In the Bible, Jesus resists Satan's offer.

But Frodo's will proves weaker.

MICHAEL DROUT: Frodo has made it to the very crack of Doom,

the edge of the chasm in the volcano where the ring was

forged.

And he has the ring on its chain.

But he can't destroy it.

It's become too much of his personality.

And he says, "I do not choose to do what I came here to do.

The ring is mine."

And he puts it on.

NARRATOR: The ring instantly makes Frodo invisible.

But he is not alone.

Gollum, the evil creature who once held the ring for hundreds

of years, has followed Frodo all the way to Mount Doom.

He desperately wants the ring back.

And now, he sees his chance.

[music playing]

MICHAEL DROUT: Gollum bites his finger off.

THOMAS FINAN: Gollum grabs the ring.

He, in turn, falls into the fiery flames of the volcano.

This destroys the ring.

It obviously destroys Gollum.

But then in a sense it liberates Frodo.

As evil as Gollum is, it's Gollum who saves Middle Earth

by doing something evil.

If Gollum hadn't done that, the world wouldn't have been saved.

So it's a nice little twist about how this all

works together.

NARRATOR: A flawed hero who doesn't save the day, it's

an ending that strays from Tolkien's Christian roots

and mythological tradition.

Usually, a tragic hero, no matter

what happens to him, at least he can feel good because he

has done the right thing.

Frodo could not.

NARRATOR: Despite Frodo's failure,

the final outcome echoes the Christian belief that good will

triumph over evil.

But that triumph comes at a cost.

After the ring is destroyed, Frodo and the hobbits

return to the Shire.

They are horrified by what awaits them there.

They find the Shire in ruins.

It's become an industrial nightmare.

There are big steel machines everywhere.

The people are oppressed.

And it's a very dirty, polluted place.

NARRATOR: It is a vision of technology run amok.

This was one of Tolkien's worst fears.

In England, he saw the same transformation

happening to the countryside he called home.

COREY OLSEN: Tolkien was deeply concerned

from his early childhood about the process

of industrialization, in large part because he saw it

as a reflection of human corruption.

That is the urge to industrialize

is in his mind inextricably connected

with this impulse to dominate.

And to Tolkien, it's the same will to dominate,

whether you're dominating people or whether you're dominating

trees and plants.

NARRATOR: When Frodo returns home from his quest to destroy

the ring, he is restless.

He has terrible dreams.

And he can't readjust to life in the Shire.

Frodo, like the author who created him,

is a soul forever changed by traumatic memories.

TROY STORFJELL: Frodo is wounded.

He is devastated by his experience.

And he can never live a normal life again.

He bears the physical wound, but he also

bears the spiritual wound in his soul.

And this has to be a metaphor for what Tolkien is going

through himself with his suffering from the First World

War.

THOMAS FINAN: I think what's really

curious about the character Frodo

and the author Tolkien is that after the end of the drama,

so to speak, after the end of World War

I, after the end of the war of the ring,

the kind of joy that we might imagine was missing.

So we see this lingering malaise in Frodo, you might say,

as a result of being the ring bearer.

And we might say that with Tolkien, he also

had this lingering, post-traumatic stress

from seeing countless people butchered in the muddy fields

of northern France.

NARRATOR: At the end of "The Lord of the Rings,"

Frodo remains deeply wounded by his battle with evil.

He leaves the Shire once and for all

to seek a new beginning in Middle Earth's holy lands.

And so ends the most ambitious mythology of the modern age.

This is really what started you

might say the whole genre of fantasy literature

as we now know it.

The idea of creating a world that really stands

as a world of its own, that has its own history,

is really fairly new and quite original.

COREY OLSEN: It's remarkable how popular "The Lord of the Rings"

is.

It's so dense in so many ways and so complicated.

But it has always had this really vibrant life

among the common readers.

And that's the thing that is so remarkable about it.

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