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What happened after The Lord of the Rings once Aragorn is king and the ring bearers have sailed West? What did Tolkien actually tell us about the Fourth Age of Middle-earth?
Hi everyone, this is Robert. Welcome to In Deep Geek. On this channel, we cover Tolkien's legendarium in depth, as well as other great fantasy worlds like A Song of Ice and Fire and The Witcher.
The Fourth Age of Middle-earth starts with the fall of Sauron and the destruction of the One Ring, basically when the main story of The Lord of the Rings ends. Everything has changed. Sauron's empire falls, Aragorn is king, Elrond, Galadriel, and Gandalf leave Middle-earth. The aging leaders of the last age, Théoden, Denethor, and Dáin, are dead. It's a new start of sorts.
So what did happen after The Lord of the Rings? Let's start with the hobbits. After the Scouring of the Shire, Sam married Rosie, and they had 13 children all told: Elanor, Frodo, Rose, Mary, Pippin, Goldilocks, Hamfast, Daisy, Primrose, Bilbo, Ruby, Robin, and Tolman. After Frodo sailed from the Grey Havens, Sam and his family moved into Bag End. He also inherited the Red Book of Westmarch, in which the legendarium of Middle-earth and the stories of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings were first preserved.
After he also left for the Undying Lands, he passed it on to his daughter Elanor, and it was then passed down generation to generation, which is how we eventually got the story. Although I'm sure he remained humble to the last, Sam became a rather important person in the Shire. He replanted the Shire after the devastation of Sharkey's reign with the soil given him by Galadriel. Where the Party Tree had been, he planted the Silver Nut, which grew into a huge Mallorn tree.
In recognition of this, he was given the honorific name "Gardener," by which his descendants were known throughout the ages. Sam himself became Mayor of the Shire, elected for seven successive seven-year terms. When his beloved wife Rosie died, he was still full of life. He had been a ring bearer too, remember, but wearied of life without her and his beloved Mr. Frodo. He sailed to the Undying Lands himself at the age of 102 to be reunited with Frodo there.
After Merry's decisive involvement in the uprising against Sharkey and the ruffians, he rather wonderfully became known as "Merry the Magnificent." Like Sam, he quickly took up a position of responsibility among the hobbits, becoming Master of Buckland. He married and also added quite a lot to the Red Book with tomes on herb lore, language, and history.
After Frodo and Sam had both sailed from the Grey Havens, however, and his wife had died, he quit the Shire with Pippin to head to Rohan. Pippin himself had become Thain of the Shire, basically head of their military, such as it was, and collected a library of historical information on the wider world for the benefit of the Shire.
When he and Merry left the Shire, leaving everything to their sons, Pippin was 94. The two of them stayed with King Éomer until he died, then onto Gondor, where they both eventually passed away after long and eventful lives. When Aragorn died, their bodies were buried beside his in perpetuity, a place of great honor.
The hobbits, more broadly, prospered into the Fourth Age. As far as we know, Aragorn formally extended the Shire to include Buckland to the east and as far as the Tower Hills to the west. It's through the hobbits' Red Book of Westmarch that we know so much of what we know about Middle-earth. I'm sure the march of technology eventually overtook them, but Aragorn guaranteed their protection and independence throughout his reign. The Shire was kept for the hobbits.
For the elves, though, the story was very different. Galadriel had predicted as much when Frodo passed through Lothlórien. With the end of the One Ring, her ring, which had been preserving and protecting Lothlórien all this time, would also lose its power. Elrond's ring too. She said to Frodo, "Do you not see now wherefore your coming is to us as the footsteps of doom? For if you fail, then we are laid bare to the enemy; yet if you succeed, then our power is diminished, and Lothlórien will fade, and the tides of time will sweep it away. We must depart into the West or dwindle to a rustic folk of dell and cave, slowly to forget and to be forgotten."
That is exactly what happened. Over the course of the next century, most elves, including all those we know by name, took ships and sailed west from the Grey Havens until the last ship, built by Círdan, carried himself and Celeborn and the last of the High Elves into the Undying Lands. By the year 120 of the Fourth Age, Rivendell and Lothlórien had both given themselves over once more to nature.
Some elves did choose to stay in Middle-earth, deep in places like the Woodland Realm and to the far east, but they grew scarcer and more secretive than ever and eventually faded away entirely. The Ents never did find the Entwives and slowly they too faded, becoming more and more like the trees they shepherded. Other magical beings, like the dragons, seemed to also