The Return of the King is the final part of J.R.R. Tolkien’s great work of imaginative fiction The Lord of the Rings. It is impossible to convey to the new reader all the book’s qualities, and the range of its creation. By turns comic, homely, epic, monstrous and diabolic, the narrative moves through countless changes of scenes and character in an imaginary world which is totally convincing in its detail. In the words of the novelist Richard Hughes ‘For width of imagination it almost beggars parallel, and it is nearly as remarkable for its vividness and narrative skills which carries the reader on enthralled for page after page’. Tolkien created in The Lord of the Rings a new mythology in an invented world which has proved timeless in its appeal.  E6