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COMING OF AGE: CHANGES OF HEART

Growth and enlightenment in "Lord of the Rings"

Frodo is the character who experiences the greatest change: from plain hobbit to selfless hero; from a well-meaning man with unplumbed depths of courage and strength of will, to one overborne at last by temptation, yet saved at the brink, and allowed to return. 'There and Back Again' in truth. Such a gamut of transformation is to be expected, since it is Frodo who, as Bearer, has closest contact with the Ring. Yet at first, the Ring would seem to prevent change. Bilbo is reckoned 'well-preserved' and the same would appear to be true of Frodo after he has inherited the ring: at 50 he retains all the youthful appearance and zest of a hobbit on the brink of manhood at 33. Some of the changes wrought in Frodo are similar to those experienced by the other hobbits, as he meets and overcomes the hardships and challenges of his quest. Yet for Frodo there is another dimension. He has always been in a position of authority; he is leader among his friends, while to Sam, his servant, he is master. Possession of the Ring itself puts him in a unique position, recognised by others:  “On [the Ringbearer] alone is any charge laid”,  Elrond says at the Company’s setting forth.14  Boromir tries to coerce him, but even so early in the quest Frodo is more than a match for him, escaping by means of his hobbit skills of stealth and by using the Ring. But Boromir has precipitated the very thing Frodo needs to avoid, use of the Ring’s power, which little by little corrupts all, even, at last, a truly decent hobbit like Frodo.

There is a foreshadowing of this at Rivendell, when Bilbo asks Frodo if he may see the Ring. But Frodo is reluctant, and suddenly sees Bilbo as  “a little wrinkled creature with a hungry face and bony groping hands”.15  The vision distresses Frodo, he puts the Ring away and it passes. But there is truth in it. Bilbo is some way down the road to becoming what Gollum has become, a hollow creature possessed by craving for the Ring; and Frodo is now the Ring’s master. Hobbits are a people whose concerns are of the earth, their desire only for peace and the good things of life, not domination over others, and so Frodo, best of hobbits, is as the Wise see, slow to be corrupted. But hobbits are not angels, as Tolkien shows us.*  They can be petty, intolerant, even grasping and arrogant like Lobelia and her son. Domination is forced upon Frodo by Gollum, whom he has to master by any means he can; and only his command of the Ring will serve his turn.  “We can bide our time… deploring maybe evils done by the way, but approving the high and ultimate purpose,”  Saruman says to Gandalf,16  who fiercely rejects the principle. Yet Frodo has in the end to use doubtful means to accomplish his ends, and pays the price. As he crawls up Mount Doom he too has become like Gollum, consumed and beaten down by the Ring, except that he keeps still a small tenacious flame of will alive to achieve his purpose. Until he stands by the Cracks of Doom, and conceives that all he was and could be lies now within the Ring, and if he casts it away, he casts himself with it. In that moment of final temptation he falls and fails. It is Gollum who saves Middle-earth, and seems to have saved Frodo. But it is not so:  “Here [we stand] at the end of all things, Sam,”  Frodo says thankfully to his faithful servant.17  Sam is as glad to see his dear master restored, as he believes, as to be rescued. But for Frodo, it is indeed the end of all things. The Ring took from him at last everything, every scrap of courage, decency, determination, the tiny remaining piece of what he had believed to be his true self, and Frodo is not, as the innocent Sam believes, healed; he is broken, broken beyond even Aragorn fully to mend.

Why does Frodo take no part in leading the Scouring of the Shire? What holds him back is fear, fear of himself. His young colleagues have grown into self-assurance; ‘lordly’, the Shire-folk later call them, but it is a genial, caring lordliness. Frodo has been to the darker side of power, understands and loathes what he found lurking in the depths of his own hobbit nature. He dares not command with such ruthlessness as his still innocent friends, lest he unleash the fiend that almost possessed him by the edge of the Cracks of Doom. His sorrow is not only for the oppressed Shire-folk, but for those hobbits, and men, seduced by power over their fellows:  “They know not what they do”.18  And ‘There but for the grace of the Valar go I’, is in his mind. A saint is seldom a good ruler, too concerned for his own soul, too compassionate of the sins of others to do what needs to be done.

But if Frodo is a saint, it is not by choice. Up until his assumption of the Ring Frodo has been a perfectly normal young hobbit— any anomalies, the Shire-folk no doubt would say, could be laid fairly and squarely at his adopted uncle Bilbo’s door. In this they would be quite right, though less because Bilbo stirred him up with strange tales, than because he gave him the Ring. After this, as already mentioned, Frodo suffers from arrested development. This is manifest particularly in the fact that, at the age of fifty, he is still unmarried.** But he is not, as Bilbo apparently is, immune to the attractions of women, and one imagines that his wistful visions of home include the normal hobbit pattern of family life. When he takes on the burden of the Quest he does not realise that the dangers are not all of death and capture; the final peril, which he does not escape, is the leaching away of all that made him truly human. Mirorring Gollum, he has come to care for nothing that once meant so much to him. In all his journey, he held to the simple hope that when his task was done, he might go home; but when at long last he does so, he finds no joy, only emptiness. His comfortable home, his good-hearted neighbours, the fields and trees he once loved— all have lost their savour.***  So has the thought of wife and family, though he clutches at Sam in an effort to experience these at second hand. But it is not enough. His dream, the impossible dream that he clung to under the horror of Sauron, has proved false, and for Frodo, “thin and stretched”19  by the devouring Ring, wracked with guilt, robbed of the warm emotions once so much a part of him, it is too much. He cannot change, he cannot grow, or only so slowly that it cannot be in this world. He goes to the haven of the Elves, who know much of Healing, but he takes his pain with him. Spiritual contemplation may help him; it is all he has left. Frodo is not going, as the Elves are, home. Frodo is going to where they can help him to die.

All the characters of the Fellowship in LotR change and grow as a result of their experience with the Ring. Even Sam Gamgee, whose essential sturdiness and loyalty does not change, attains the position of master rather than that of servant when Frodo leaves him Bag End; though his later position of Mayor remains, as he operates it, still one of service to his community.

The other young hobbits grow up, grow into self-awareness and into their positions as responsible leaders of their people. Aragorn comes into his kingship. Legolas and Gimli grow away from the prejudices of their past and into friendship with one another. Boromir learns that his place in the world is not as he perceived it, but acceptance of his true rôle comes too late to prevent his death. Death, with resurrection, also figures in the growth encompassed by the two chief protagonists in the War of the Ring. Gandalf and Frodo are both Christ-figures; but it is Frodo who most embodies the Lamb of Christian myth. For others to gain Middle-earth, he must lose it; for his people to live, he must die. And yet he does not die, but is condemned to everlasting life.

* See FotR 31,39,46-48,77-78.

** So of course was Bilbo, but Bilbo is not a similar case; Frodo does not at any time exhibit the fussy, almost womanish ways of the confirmed bachelor, as Bilbo does. No, he is a convivial young fellow, approved of by the other hobbits, and once he inherited Bag End would inevitably be the target of a bevy of hopeful mothers and their marriageable daughters. This in itself might be enough to put off a sensitive young man whose dreams were probably of Elf-maidens; but that in almost twenty years he would fail to succumb to natural desires is incredible, without the influence of the Ring. After all, his two young kinsmen, Merry and Pippin, very similar to Frodo in many ways, settle down with suitable wives on returning from their adventures—no doubt the pick of their respective neighbourhoods, but one suspects that Merry at least may have had his eye on his future wife before he left the Shire. Much younger than Frodo, he simply was not ready, at that point, to be courting seriously. But Frodo, nearly twenty years older, seems to be stuck at an even earlier stage of adolescence (and now comes the point at which I air one of my pet theories, namely that Frodo falls in love with Goldberry. “‘Fair lady Goldberry!’ said Frodo at last, feeling his heart moved with a joy that he did not understand …the spell that was now laid on him was different; less keen and lofty was the delight, but deeper and nearer to mortal heart”. Then, when he has been hurried off on his journey, he is devastated when he remembers he has not said goodbye to her. Nor has he said goodbye to Tom, who has been of much greater service to him; but does he cry, “Good gracious! We never said goodbye to good old Tom”? No, what he exclaims is “Goldberry!… My fair lady!” I rest my case. Of course this is all quite hopeless, since she is marreid to Tom Bombadil, and this is really the point. Frodo is ready for romance, but it still needs to be of the adolescent kind where the object is unattainable. He shows similar yearnings later toward Arwen. Freed of the Ring at this point, he might well have come in a few more years to a satisfying relationship with a real, down-to-earth hobbit woman.

*** He has lost his belief in the unalloyed goodness of people, even his own Shire-folk, but this is not the chief reason for his disillusion. To see that humanity is imperfect is a mark of maturity, and a further mark is to accept it.

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First published in Mallorn [journal of the Tolkien Society] #39