Spoilers

[mneme]

willshetterly posted a set of rules for commenting in his blog/journal, including "no spoilers". Naturally, I had to post some.

I've numbered them, to make it easy to guess what they're spoilers -to- -- some are easy, some trivial, some pretty hard. drcpunk is ineligible because she guessed most of them already and was told the rest.

1. It's a sled. (fleetfootmike)
   
2. He's a she. (easy, but arguably devotedbear. Ambug was the first to name it, though)
   
3. They win. They win, but the king still dies. One wins, two lose, one doesn't play, all but one dies, and he's not the one that won. (kokoinai)
   
4. After going to the moon, they come home. (stormsweeper)
   
5. After going to the moon, they go into space and conquer the galaxy.
   
6. The big bad guys lose. The big good guys have left the building.
   
7. They do, in fact, find the promised land. And keep it for a while. Here are some rules for you to follow. (fiddledragon)
   
8. He loses, but gets a new job, and so do all his friends.
   
9. They win. But that's boring, so they start over again. (tirerim)
   
10. They die and go to heaven. (fiddledragon)
    
11. Five return, and one goes alone. (fiddledragon)
    
12. Some go, two stay and rule. And two stay for a long while, and then go.(fleetfootmike)
    
13. They live happily ever after.
    

(the last one's not worth guessing, but it's the only spoiler without a specific behind it)

Comments

[jl8e]

And you leave out Merry and Pippin entirely.

[mneme]

Arwen is extremely important at the ending -- she's the last surviving named character in Middle Earth.

Sam -is- the other one who stays for a long while, then goes. Those two are Frodo and Sam.

Merry, Pippin, and various others aren't really part of this, because they belong in middle earth, and they stay in middle earth; I'm not talking about the Fellowship, but those on the boundaries. Or I'd have mentioned Gimli as well.

So the elves, Gandalf, etc go to the west. So, eventually, do Frodo and Sam. Aragorn and Arwen might go to the west as well, should they choose; Arwen's half-elven and can choose to go either way, and Aragorn could arguably have made that choice as well, both through mercy (because of his true love with Arwen) and genealogy (Aragorn is, after all, of Elven stock himself, the first Numenorian king having been Elrond half-elven's brother -- though it seems that while descendants of half-elves who choose immortality might make their own choice and become mortal, that descendants of those who choose mortality do not have the choice presented again at every generation. Perhaps because the blessing of man (i.e., that of free will, or if you like, free destiny) is deemed so much greater than that of elves (immortality)? Hell if I know.

Regardless, yeah, if I were considering the -fellowship-, it would have been more like "one dies, four rise to greatness, three depart, and two write a book". (with Sam appearing three times, and Frodo twice, and leaving out G's death and return as not an -ending-, exactly).

[drcpunk.livejournal.com]

Gimli and Legolas leave Middle Earth together. I'm not sure if that's before or after Sam leaves.

Aragorn, Arwen, and Arwen's brothers stay, all choosing to be human and to accept death. Elrond leaves, of course.

[womzilla.livejournal.com]

I've mentioned before that I was somewhat shocked, upon my re-reading of The Lord of the Rings a few years ago, the degree to which Arwen in the text of the novel plays the part of a trophy. Yes, in the Appendicies we get some sense of her "real" story, but in the body of the novel itself, not even slightly.

So, she's not important at the ending of The Lord of the Rings. She might well be* the last named character from the novel to die, but that's not the same thing at all.

*Actually, I bet Tom Bombadil survives her, though perhaps his little bubble of story wanders completely out of Middle Earth before her death. It's unclear what happens to the other immortal magical characters who are not elves--the Ents, Radagast the Brown, and Gwaihir for instance. It's fair to guess that Shelob dies at the hands of Faramir and Eowyn the Slayer, but that's also never stated.