This is a story about the theatrical release of The Fellowship of the Ring, about finding hope in your despair and despair in your hope, and about the year 2001.

I first read The Lord of the Rings at age nine, enraptured by the fold-out maps in my mother’s beautiful 1978 hardcover set. I didn’t understand half of what I read (I somehow came out of it thinking Shelob was a large, human woman, among other youthful reading comprehension problems), but I was spellbound by the hobbits. One was a Sam, like me! Trying to do his best in a big, confusing world, like me!

There’s a certain childlike innocence to the hobbits that I believe has enduring appeal for kids. They lead simple lives focused on food and family and parties with their friends, and all the while there are taller, more world-savvy people patrolling the borders of their home, keeping the worst dangers out. But those dangers can’t be held at bay forever.

Inevitably, whether they are ready or not, the innocent are thrust into the world of Men.

Let’s rip the band-aid off: Twenty-five years ago, in March of 2001, I was in a high school shooting. Two boys died and thirteen students and staff were wounded. There have been bigger and many more tragedies since then, but at the time it was considered the second worst school shooting in the United States after Columbine.

I was lucky. An honor-track student inclined to get to class early, I was already inside when the shooting started and we quickly went into lockdown. I heard it, but I didn’t see it. I recognized what I was hearing, but I didn’t know what else to do other than sit under my desk and wait. This wasn’t something that happened regularly back then.

When we finally evacuated, I got lucky again: My class’s route off campus did not pass by the bodies. I found my sister in the grocery store parking lot across the street. The news blared across local radio and TV, drawing our parents in to pick us up. We went home.

In The Lord of the Rings, the hobbits do not know what they are getting themselves into when they bravely set forth from the Shire. They are on an adventure. They are walking farther from home than they’ve ever been. They have a couple of scares, but it isn’t until Weathertop, when a Nazgûl stabs Frodo, that the danger comes home to them in a moment of shocking violence unlike anything they’ve experienced before.

How could this happen to them? Two weeks ago, they were just hobbits, living in holes in the ground. For the rest of the story, they are hunted, and every moment of refuge is only temporary. Whatever beautiful place they manage to find rest in, they are painfully aware that outside, more horrors await.

The rest of spring 2001 is a blur, to be honest. There were news cameras and therapeutic art projects and homework assignments and state testing, and then we all fled home for the reprieve of summer break.

The next fall we came back ready for a fresh start. But on September 11, our teachers abruptly wheeled in their classroom TV sets, and we all watched the aftermath of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, as well as the final crash of UA Flight 93 in Pennsylvania. Over the next days and months, the same sentiment that had just gripped our town gripped the nation: How could this happen here? There were seemingly no jokes allowed on television. No songs about planes. Nothing but national mourning with a heaping side of racism. And a nu metal song inspired by our shooting rocketed up the charts and wouldn’t. stop. playing. on. the radio.

But then, December 19, 2001, in the latter half of the last month of that uniquely shitty year: The Fellowship of the Ring came out in theaters.

Over the course of the movie, the fellowship is formed, and then it is broken. Their company loses Gandalf to shadow and Boromir to the enemy. They know pain and grief like never before.

But the survivors keep going. Aragorn, Gimli, and Legolas set off to rescue Merry and Pippin. Sam chases after Frodo, refusing to let him journey on to Mordor alone.

And though he had been determined to forge on by himself and not risk losing anyone else he cared about, in the final line of the film, Frodo admits: “Sam? I’m glad you’re with me.”

I can’t describe how feral my friends went for this film, how desperately we needed it at that time. We spent the months leading up to its release rereading the books together (at this point, it was very clear to me that Shelob was a spider). I am aware of the changes the movies made, the critiques of lifelong fans. I don’t care. We boggled at it in theaters. We bought the soundtrack. We eagerly awaited the Extended Edition. And for the next two years, December meant more Lord of the Rings. We watched them in film class. We watched them with friends. Our English teacher wore an Evenstar necklace every day and made us jealous over his vacation to New Zealand. Over and over, we watched Frodo lament, “I wish none of this had happened,” and Gandalf reply, “So do all who live to see such times.”

And we weren’t alone, though our reasons were different. Post-9/11 America went wild for the movie, with much of the country convinced that America was on the side of good and our opponents were the interchangeable orcs. Hate crimes rose. Action movies doubled down on Middle Eastern villains. The “War on Terror” began. It’s a terrible blight in the film’s history, the reason for its astronomical success uncomfortably intertwined with a nationwide trauma response that ended countless lives.

This interpretation (America as the fellowship valiantly resisting evil) was so prevalent that when the cast went on a press tour the next year for The Two Towers, they felt compelled to argue against it.¹ If there was a metaphor to be read here, America was not the valiant and noble underdog.

The truth is, the fantasy of good versus evil, the fantasy of facing mortal peril with a stoic face and valor in one’s heart, is only that: a fantasy. In the real world, violence is fast and ugly and dirty and cruel, and it leaves a mark.

What I love about Fellowship, and the trilogy as a whole, is not the simplicity of the conflict or the fantasy of the valor of battle. What I love is the acknowledgement that even if those things were true, even if war was a grim necessity and the sides were clear: to survive horror is to be forever changed by it. There are some events that are so momentous, they split the world in half around them. There is before, and there is after, and there is no going back to before.

What I love is the bittersweet ending.

Now, I’m not opposed to other endings. I watch comedies when I want to feel good, and I watch tragedies when I need a good cry. But when it comes to my own work, I can’t quite imagine a happily ever after that spirals uncomplicatedly into the future. I just don’t believe the world works that way. And I also can’t write purely grim, nihilistic endings. The world doesn’t work that way, either. We persist. The world doesn’t end. For better or worse, nothing ends.

That leaves me with the bittersweet, the world that has changed irrevocably, but still goes on. A bittersweet ending has a ring of truth to it. It is pensive. It is heavy. At most, it is happy-for-now.

In December of 2003, The Return of the King finally came out in theaters. Some of my friends raced out to the midnight showing and slept at school the next day. The rest of us waited in agony until Saturday. We were the last class of students who had been in the shooting. We were on the cusp of turning eighteen, our college applications were in, we were gearing up for our last semester on a campus where they’d locked up the south side boys’ bathroom and never opened it again, and in that dark little cave of a movie theater, we watched the hobbits come home from the war together.

There are plenty of jokes about the many endings of The Return of the King, the fades to black and white, the epilogue after epilogue. But life doesn’t end at the conclusion of the battle. Life doesn’t end with the homecoming, either, and it doesn’t end one year later. In The Return of the King, victory is unavoidably tangled with tragedy. Frodo is haunted, physically and mentally, by all he has been through and what he became.

It’s an acknowledgment that life resumes—you go back to school, you clear the rubble, you have a drink at the Green Dragon, you make art projects about your feelings, you build monuments, you finally ask someone out on a date—but it never goes back to the way things were. You’ve learned the horrors of the world of Men and you can’t unlearn them.

The children return from Narnia, shocked that they are expected to act like children again after all they’ve seen and done. The final girl survives, but it doesn’t bring back her friends. The crew successfully transmits the Death Star plans into rebel hands, at the cost of their own lives. Frodo saves the Shire, but not for himself.

Finding hope in moments of despair? That is deeply moving, that’s a tried-and-true method to write a rousing story that stirs the soul and inspires readers and viewers everywhere. And weaving despair into moments of hope? That’s ballsy, that’s painful, that is heartbreaking, and god, do I eat it up with a spoon. Yes, we’ve got to cling to happiness wherever we can find it, but also, to paraphrase Gandalf: There are some wounds that will never be fully healed.

I can’t help living in that middle space, in my writing and in my life. I can’t help finding beauty in the darkest moments and little threads of sadness in the flush of success. I compulsively crack jokes in the midst of disaster, and when everything is perfectly fine, I sit by myself with headphones on and listen to some gloriously melancholic 90s alt rock, just to feel my feelings for a bit.

We’re all of these things at once is what I’m saying, and there are rich, nuanced possibilities for our work when we explore the tension between happiness and sadness, the weight of our lives and losses interwoven with our hopes for the future. The bittersweet ending is a reminder that we have gotten through tragedy before, and there is light on the other side. It’s a reminder to cherish what we have right now, because we might not always have it.

Done right, the bittersweet ending leaves you teary-eyed but also strangely cheered. It leaves you thinking. You feel it in your chest, the tug-of-war of it, the wish it had gone better and the relief it had not gone worse, because you know what it’s like, don’t you? You know what it’s like to live in the world, where the good and the bad come one after the other and sometimes simultaneously. You know what it’s like to be devastated by tragedy and also heartened by the people who step in afterward to help, the bitterness of grief and the sweetness of turning to a loved one for comfort.

The bittersweet ending knows that terrible things happen. We don’t all survive. Those that do carry on with loss in their hearts.

But if we’re lucky, we do it all with friends by our side.

 

¹           It’s really worth watching Viggo Mortensen gently but firmly argue, at a time when it was anathema to hold this position, that America was the Saruman of the Middle East: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3vbTuo47VQ.

© 2026 Samantha Mills