his ancestral throne (Bard/Aragorn); and the questing party returns home to find it in a deteriorated condition (having possessions auctioned off/the Scouring of the Shire). Randel Helms, a scholar of literature including Tolkien, comments that the two novels have the same story and the same theme, "a quest on which a most unheroic hobbit achieves heroic stature". Further, Helms writes, both have the "there and back again" quest romance format, and both quests have a timescale of one year (spring to spring, and autumn to autumn, respectively). He comments that while the two novels are thus structurally similar, "the natures of the two quests and the reasons for beginning them are strikingly different," Bilbo's being "at first little more than a lark with venal motives" whereas Frodo "goes with the pain of a sad but noble decision". The Silmarillion is not a quest novel, but it contains quests of its own. Lúthien and Beren, royal Elf and Man, are sent on a quest by Lúthien's father Thingol who is opposed to her marrying a mortal Man. He sets a seemingly impossible task as the bride price: Beren has to bring him one of the Silmarils from the Dark Lord Morgoth's Iron Crown. Balanced structures Quest balanced against series of tableaux The scholar of humanities Brian Rosebury writes that The Lord of the Rings combines a slow, descriptive series of scenes or tableaux illustrating Middle-earth with a unifying plotline in the shape of the quest to destroy the One Ring. The Ring needs to be destroyed to save Middle-earth itself from destruction or domination by Sauron. The work builds up Middle-earth as a place that readers come to love, shows that it is under dire threat, and – with the destruction of the Ring – provides the "eucatastrophe" for a happy ending. The work is thus, Rosebury asserts, very tightly constructed, the expansive descriptions and the Ring-based plot fitting together exactly. Quests of the Ring and the Shire Tolkien scholars and critics have noted that the penultimate chapter of The Lord of the Rings, "The Scouring of the Shire", with its separate quest to save the Shire, implies some kind of formal structure for the whole work. The critic Bernhard Hirsch accepts Tolkien's statement in the foreword to the Fellowship of the Ring that the formal structure of The Lord of the Rings, namely a journey outward for the main quest