turning and turning in the widening gyre...
I really like the gyre analogy. It seems to work better than roads and rings as separate ideas--the gyre allows for, as Boromir88 said, characters returning to their homes but still being changed.
Also, I think you were right on in bringing up Yeats, Fordim. The Second Coming is very like the Lord of the Rings in a way--it's about the end of an age. Just as at the end of the Third Age the situation for Middle Earth seemed desperate and many people lost hope, so in the poem "the falcon cannot hear the falconer." And what's more, is Sauron the "rough beast"? (Sorry, I'm quoting from memory, always a dangerous proposition and especially in the morning--I apologize if I'm getting it wrong.) I think he wanted to be. I think he would have been at the (new) center of things if the Ring had not been destroyed.
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