Reading Lord of the Rings for the umpteenth time. Loving it still; almost depressed that I an nearing the end.

And finding new appreciation for J.R.R. Tolkien’s plotting and narrative skills. Books 3 through 6 are marvels of elastic storytelling, with the author shifting among as many as four plot lines.

Three of the plot lines come together in the Battle of the Pelennor Fields where (spoiler alert!) … good King Theoden of Rohan is killed.

Which set me to thinking … that has to be one of the best ways for a king to exit this mortal coil. Killed in battle.

As opposed to watching and then running (looking at you, Darius III) or getting sick and dying in your tent at age 33 (hello, Alexander) or watching and running and later caught and executed (yes, you, Charles I).

Eventually, I came around to the question: How many kings have been killed in battle? Real kings, not fictional. And yes, there is a wiki page for that.

This page skews European, and also northern/western European.

(Who knew Sweden and Norway were so rough on their kings, for several hundred years there?)

But the list has a handful of non-European kings killed in battle. Some Arabs. A Sri Lankan. A Persian. Etc.

Probably the three most famous “killed in battle” kings, in the English-speaking world would be Harold Godwinson, Richard III and Gustavus Adolphus.

Harold was the memorable loser in the all-or-nothing fight for England in the year 1066. He was part of a three-man scrum to be king, and Harold had defeated Harald Hardrada, king of Norway, on September 25 in the Battle of Stamford Bridge. Harald died in that one, with an arrow to the throat, it is said.

That left Harold, the Anglo-Saxon king, to rush south from York to the south coast to take on William of Normandy, who had just landed an army.

On October 14, Harold was killed in the history-changing Battle of Hastings, and the famous Bayeux Tapestry (which makes Hastings perhaps the best-reported battle in medieval history) shows him being killed by an arrow in the eye.

So, yes, Harold went out in a blaze of glory — two hard-fought battles in three weeks, winning and killing a king in the first, losing and being killed in the second.

Richard III, also an English king, has a bad reputation, thanks mostly to Shakespeare’s play of the same name. But Richard did not shrink from the battlefield — he is thought to have been in the thick of the fighting in the Battle of Bosworth Field, in 1485, when he was killed by several blows to the head.

(His remains were found a few years ago, and his skull was a mess.)

The third king that stands out, to me, is Gustavus Adolphus, the king whose Swedish army was decisive in the Thirty Years War. Thus, he had a much bigger historical impact than the first two mentioned here.

The bit of mystery involved in his death also is interesting. No one is quite sure what happened, at the Battle of Lutzen in 1632. He apparently was leading a cavalry charge when he became separated from his troops. His body was found, after the battlefield, with at least two bullet wounds and one stab wound.

Like Tolkien’s Theoden, Gustavus Adolphus won a battle while losing his life, and if a king is going to be killed, that ending is about as good as it gets — leaving Gustavus as one of the best-known soldiers in history, as well as one of the most famous Swedes.