The Lord Of The Rings fans stunned by alternate ending we never knew existed

The Lord of the Rings trilogy comes to an end with a mostly positive feeling - Frodo has destroyed the ring, Middle-Earth is rid of evil, and the land knows some peace.

Of course, there are some sad notes there, as Frodo also sails off to Valinor, burdened by the weight of the One Ring still, but all in all, The Lord of the Rings ends well for all.

The Lord of the Rings could have ended very differently

It might come as a bit of a shock to readers and viewers of the famed fantasy trilogy that Tolkien had other ideas on how to end the tale.

In some of his letters, the author laid out a few ideas that would have had everything feeling very different.

Laid out neatly on Reddit, iniondubh goes into several options that were considered, but were ultimately shelved for the ending we’re familiar with.

One ending possibly would have seen Frodo throw himself into Mount Doom along with the ring, after being possessed by it.

“Frodo too would then probably, if not attacked, have had to take the same way: cast himself with the Ring into the abyss,” says the letter, as described by iniondubh.

The user described another ending that Tolkien considered, which had Frodo become lord over the Nazgul before Sauron and the hobbit faced off.

This ending would have seen Sauron victorious, which would have contradicted the overall themes of the story.

“In any case, a confrontation of Frodo and Sauron would soon have taken place, if the Ring was intact. Its result was inevitable. Frodo would have been utterly overthrown: crushed to dust, or preserved in torment as a gibbering slave,” explains the Redditor.

Thankfully, the author stuck to the more inspiring and happier of his options.

Another user in the Reddit messages informs others that one chapter was cut that felt more like a happy ever after - “The original ending was a final chapter that jumps ahead in time of Sam reading the book to his children, and telling them of a letter he just got that King Aragorn would be visiting. I wish this hadn’t been cut.”

Perhaps this was a bit too ‘on the nose’ for the original texts.