Talk:The Return of the King

Use of the Ring to Destroy the Gate of Minas Tirith
Can I ask where it's stated that the Witch-King uses the power of his ring to destroy the gate? It's not in the Lord of the Rings itself so I think it requires a citation. GimliDotNet (talk) 20:49, 6 April 2023 (UTC)
 * Reworded: magical power is certainly used, as the ram Grond is bound about with spells. But whether it's from the Ring is another matter. Chiswick Chap (talk) 20:55, 6 April 2023 (UTC)

Excessive plot/contents detail
From time to time, editors seek to extend the summaries in this and the other The Lord of the Rings book articles. The novel is obviously much loved, and the many fans of book and film naturally wish to see the articles providing the sort of coverage that they might find in a dedicated Tolkien encyclopedia or fansite.

However, Wikipedia is not such a site, and it deprecates extensive summaries. The existing summaries have been carefully constructed to cover the central narrative, starting with one short sentence per chapter: and the result was already to create rather detailed summaries. These have been polished over the years, and in the main they have reached rather stable form, though of course definite errors can always be fixed. What we can't have is constantly growing length.

The same applies in this volume to the Appendices, which are extremely long and detailed, and of great interest to fans and scholars. Wikipedia again can't begin to reproduce the full content of these extensive sections of the novel, though I daresay that Appendices to The Lord of the Rings would make a fine and scholarly article if properly researched and cited. For the current article, the coverage is necessarily brief, and limited to the key facts. That does mean that many details have to be omitted; again, there are plenty of large books and websites that cover exactly that kind of material in loving detail, which we are obliged to refrain from including.

To give just one example, "Reveals that Sam and Rosie had thirteen children and that Pippin and Merry also respectively married; Pippin's son Faramir married Sam's daughter Goldilocks." is in my view inappropriate for this article in both style ("Reveals" is journalese, not encyclopedic; the article is written in British English sentences) and in content (these are minor details, not central to the narrative). Chiswick Chap (talk) 08:08, 27 August 2023 (UTC)


 * I agree that the details recently added are minor and ought not to be included. The violate the intent and guidelines of WP:SUMMARY and WP:PLOT. Strebe (talk) 19:51, 27 August 2023 (UTC)