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@gabriellepollack
Oh my gracious goodness. Dear girl, you had me ready to run in with an elvish blade at the title of this thread!!
Well, I have to agree with @wordsmith over @daeus-lamb (I have got to quit agreeing with @wordsmith on everything… Wait, no I just remembered. The Hobbit.). When I read the last bit of TROTK, I was sitting in my bed listening to The Last Goodbye. When I reached the last page, I sat stunned and could not close the book for several minutes. I had just blown my brain reading those books, they were just amazing. I had only seen TFOTR at this time, and I had read the book before seeing it, so I had enough to get my feet wet, but I didn’t have anything to compare it to.
I personally think that the way it ends with evil touching the Shire, I think it really does have something to add. I feel that in a way, if it was “they all returned to the Shire, and lived happily ever after.” It would cause loss to the story. I mean, look at the many people that LOTR has affected (and BTW, @wordsmith, how you described the themes in LOTR was beautiful, that did a good job summing up the biggest reason I love LOTR). We are walking examples of people whose lives would be different without reading LOTR. I have not lost the wonder that I felt when I sat feeling like I had been knocked to the floor after finishing LOTR (I sung Into the West about three times today, plus a few more LOTR songs). My point is, if we are so affected by LOTR, how could the characters be the same after the journey of LOTR. In The Hobbit Bilbo goes back home, but he is not the same. Even though his story has a “happily ever after”, in the beginning of LOTR, we see how he is different from the stuffy hobbit he used to be. Frodo, in a way, was broken by LOTR. I feel that in a way, the brokenness of the Shire perhaps reflects Frodo’s brokenness. The world is changed, and I think that the Shire being changed has a way of adding the final blow that makes us really resonate with Frodo leaving. I can’t quite put my finger on it, but I do think that the brokenness of the Shire put a final blow on my heart when I read it (especially how Bilbo’s tree was cut down/Sam planting a new one). It prepared me to say goodbye and call it complete.