The Lord of the Rings ends with the departure of the last of the Elves from Middle-earth, and the evident dwindling or fading away of all the non-human peoples - the Ents have no Entwives and so are childless; the Dwarves are few; the monstrous Orcs and Trolls that survived the Battle of the Morannon are scattered; the last of the Elves have sailed beyond the Uttermost West to Valinor. The Hobbits are few and might easily be overlooked; the Men of Gondor have a renewal of Elvish blood, one last time, through the marriage of Arwen to their King, Aragorn. All that is left is a world of Men, fading from past glories to the world of today, complete with the industrialisation and pollution of the planet that Tolkien so bitterly resented and regretted, as he described in The Scouring of the Shire.