"Tolkien confessed that 1/3rd of the way through The Fellowship of the Ring some ruffian named Strider confronted the hobbits in an inn, & Tolkien was in despair. He didn’t know who Strider was, where the book was going, or what to write next. Strider turns out to be no lesser person than Aragorn, the unrecognized & uncrowned king of all the forces of good, whose restoration to rule is, along with the destruction of the evil ring, the engine that moves the plot of the whole massive trilogy."
