Everything you (maybe) don't know about The Lord of the Rings - The Return of the King

The Return of the King returns to cinemas for the first time in 4K from July 31 to August 4. Anyone who has lived through the 2000s remembers it well: between 2003 and 2004, the film trilogy of The Lord of the Rings had its closure with The Return of the King. A coherent and not artificial conclusion, rewarded with an enormous success with the public. Almost fifteen years from that moment, we want to go back to this great closure, to investigate its most hidden curiosities and meanings.

The too revealing title

Exactly as happened with Le Due Torri, The Return of the King also had its little title controversy. To investigate it we must once again go back to the page, or to the word of J.R.R. Tolkien. Speaking of The Two Towers, we have seen how the Professor had divided his work into six "books". The three "parts" now considered canonical (The Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers and The Return of the King) were an invention of the publisher Allen & Unwin. This division was dictated by the length of the novel, by the uncertainty of its success and by the narrowness of the second post-war period.

Clearly, once the success of the work was ascertained, the Lord of the Rings was once again considered as a unicum, in a perspective faithful to what Tolkien thought. But by a strange twist of fate, these "three parts of necessity" have entered the collective imagination. So much so that even today not only is the trilogy denomination of The Lord of the Rings widespread, but also the film adaptation has been divided into three films. The curator Quirino Principe then said that the first printing of the Italian edition of The Lord of the Rings was completed on October 18, 1970, that is exactly fifty years ago.