Anticlimatic Or Just Plain Sad, These Characters Could’ve Had So Much More
The Lord of the Rings is, by almost any measure, a triumph of storytelling, but triumphant stories are not always fair ones, and Tolkien was never in the business of handing out perfect or complete resolutions to everyone who deserved them. Some characters burn brightly and are snuffed out too soon, others limp quietly into obscurity after giving everything they had, and a few are handed endings so cold or so bleak that it feels downright depressing. Whether you come to this debate through the films, the books, or the broader lore, the feeling tends to be the same: certain characters did the work, showed up when it mattered, and still got shortchanged. Here are 20 of them, ranked not by importance but by the weight of what they were denied.
1. Boromir
Boromir's redemption at Amon Hen is one of the most moving scenes in the entire saga, a man finally defeating the worst version of himself seconds before he breathes his final breath. Fans have long argued that the tragedy is not the death itself but the missed potential of watching Boromir fight alongside Aragorn as a changed man, loyal and clear-eyed, for the wars still to come.
2. Frodo Baggins
Frodo carries the Ring all the way to the fires of Mount Doom, and the story rewards him with permanent psychological damage, an inability to find peace in the Shire, and a one-way voyage to the Undying Lands. Sure, we can argue about the “Hero’s Journey” all we want, but it’s heartwrenching to watch this brave soul leave his own world due to this long-lasting grief and sorrow.
3. Saruman
Whether you follow the film version, where Wormtongue stabs him off a balcony, or the book version, where he is diminished to a petty tyrant scouring a corner of the Shire, Saruman gets an ending that feels more like disposal than reckoning. A wizard of his stature, however corrupted, deserved a more satisfying and weighty confrontation.
4. Galadriel
There are a plethora of lore-specific reasons as to why Galadriel immediately retreats after her interaction with the ring, but to regular moviegoers, it was likely a little confusing. Why would someone with so much grace and power just have to fade into the background of these films?
5. Éowyn
Éowyn defeats the Witch-king of Angmar, one of the single greatest acts of courage in the entire story, and her reward is marriage to Faramir. We could’ve learned so much more about her and her story. Unsurprisingly, a man born in 1892 probably didn’t know how to write extensively on powerful female characters.
Gage Skidmore from Peoria, AZ, United States of America on Wikimedia
6. Arwen
Arwen gives up her passage to the Undying Lands due to her love of Aragorn. Sadly, after he passes, she travels to a now-empty Lothlórien and dies of a broken heart. It is, by any measure, one of the bleakest fates in this story.
7. Samwise Gamgee
Sam returns to the Shire, builds a life, raises a family, and eventually sails West himself. This is all fine and good, but moviegoers will recall the sorrowful goodbye Sam and Frodo have at the end of the third movie. The bittersweet undertow of Sam's life after the War of the Ring is something fans rarely talk about.
Pseudopanax at English Wikipedia on Wikimedia
8. Isildur
Isildur's failure at the Cracks of Doom defines his legacy, but the man who helped defeat Sauron the first time around and who founded a dynasty that shaped Middle-earth for centuries deserved more than a muddy death by orc arrows at the Gladden Fields. His story ends before it can fully account for what he actually accomplished.
9. Denethor
Denethor is not a sympathetic villain, but he is a comprehensible one, a man broken by grief, by a corrupted palantír, and by the certainty that he had already lost everything before the battle began. Watching him burn without any moment of restored clarity or dignity is one of the hardest things the story asks of its readers, especially when we know what comes after.
10. Théoden
Théoden's arc from enchanted shell to rallying king is one of the great recoveries in fantasy literature, and he dies at the height of it, at Pelennor Fields, with Rohan still needing the steady hand he had only just reclaimed.
11. Haldir
Haldir appears briefly in the films as the Elves' representative at Helm's Deep. He fights with quiet precision, and dies in a sequence that gives him almost no final words and no real farewell. For a character who carried significant weight in his brief screen time, that exit is frustratingly thin.
Matias Tukiainen from Espoo, Finland on Wikimedia
12. Gollum
Gollum spends centuries enslaved to an object he cannot resist, helps destroy it by accident while grasping for it one last time, and falls into the fire with no one mourning him and no peace anywhere in his ending. He is the story's most pitiable figure, and his death offers him nothing but release.
Daniel Govar (Official Website, DeviantArt Profile) on Wikimedia
13. Faramir
Faramir is one of Tolkien's more carefully drawn characters, a man of genuine wisdom and restraint in a world full of men who would have taken the Ring without a second thought, but the story spends his final chapters sidelining him after Aragorn's return.
14. Celebrimbor
Celebrimbor forged the Rings of Power in good faith and was tricked, tortured, and killed by Sauron, with his body used as a war banner as a final humiliation.
Eugenie Vasilyeff from Perm, Russia on Wikimedia
15. Gríma Wormtongue
Wormtongue is contemptible for most of his story, but he is also comprehensibly miserable, a small man who attached himself to power because he had no other way to survive. His death at Hobbit hands in the Shire, killed before he can even finish what he started, feels like the story kicking him on the way out.
Urbin at English Wikipedia on Wikimedia
16. Beregond
Beregond breaks military law to save Faramir's life, and his reward is exile from the city he protected. The technicality of his punishment isn’t often discussed, but maybe it should be.
17. Elendil
Elendil died facing Sauron directly, but the speed and finality of it leave one of Middle-earth's great founders without a proper accounting of what his life and reign actually meant. His legacy outlives him handsomely; his death does not honor him on the same scale.
18. Gildor Inglorion
Gildor Inglorion crosses paths with the hobbits early in the story, offers wisdom, and then disappears almost entirely, his fate after the War of the Ring unaddressed in any meaningful way.
19. Tom Bombadil
Tom Bombadil is an ancient being, unaffected by the Ring, and apparently the only being in Middle-earth immune to Sauron's power, which makes his complete irrelevance to the story's resolution one of its genuinely puzzling loose ends. Whether that was Tolkien's intention or not, it leaves one of the world's most fascinating figures standing outside the story with nowhere to go.
Midjourney by Hektor on Wikimedia
20. Quickbeam (Bregalad)
Quickbeam lost his rowan trees to the Orcs, joined the Ents in their march on Isengard, and then watched the larger question of what happens to Fangorn and its remaining inhabitants drift entirely off the page. The Ents' grief and their future deserved much more than what they received.
