Category: Writing Community and Inspiration

[ALERT: If you are not familiar with the end of The Lord of the Rings, do not continue…]

It is that time of year again, my favorite time—the season that runs from Hobbit Day (22 September) to Christmas—when I always long to return to Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. Perhaps I will in January. Right now, so much is going on—in work, in current reading, novel revisions, my newborn little niece, and simply Life—that I want to choose my timing carefully. But whether it is that autumnal something in the air, or perhaps the prospect of soon resuming (likely in December) the little local mythopoeic reading group that has been on hold due to Covid, or meditating on the nature of friendships near and far, including once-inseparable friends I haven’t seen in a long time, I don’t know—but for whatever reason, the subject of friendship, of the beauty hidden in human (and hobbit) failure, and of Frodo, has been haunting my thoughts persistently. I was reminded of this again at church on Sunday, as we meditated on the Suffering Servant in Isaiah.

I first read The Lord of the Rings in my teens. (Of course, life has never been the same since!) Aragorn was my first love from that book; gradually, my heart was given more and more to Sam, and then Frodo. That’s one of the magical things about Tolkien: all the characters are given their due; every character has an integral role to play in the fulfillment of the story’s quest, and it couldn’t have been accomplished without the whole of the Fellowship and those whose assistance and friendship they gain. Each reader (or viewer) perhaps has a different favorite character; each reader may have a different favorite depending on the season of the reader’s life. It might be Gandalf one year, and Eowyn the next; it might be Aragorn at first, and Sam at last. And that’s all to the good.

Not to name names, but another beloved magical series—which I will nonetheless always treasure in many ways—somewhat disappointed me at its concluding book, partly because it didn’t quite manage this bit of magic in the end, brilliantly set up as I thought it had been. My favorite character was given a sendoff unworthy of him and of what I thought the author had clued us in to in previous books. Other beloved ensemble characters were taken down a peg, perhaps to lift up the heroism of the central character, as though it were a zero-sum game. It’s not that the series was ended wrong, or badly; the most central ethos of it was lovely. Only that, given all that had been set up in the previous books, it could have been even more powerful. (Though I had read all of the lead-up books in this series multiple times before the final book was published, I have read the final book only once, and have struggled to go back to the series since.)

It seems to me that some of the stories that stay with us the most, haunting us like friendly spirits, are those whose climax and finale are both surprising, and yet, somehow, inevitable. A finale which you perhaps couldn’t have guessed ahead of time—not exactly—and yet, when it happens, it is so unaccountably fulfilling that you know it couldn’t possibly have ended any other way; as though it had been ordained by the great Storyteller at the very foundation of Story itself. There is a deeper magic in it, to borrow a Lewisian idea. A novel I read years ago concludes with the words, Surprise me; and in the context of the novel, nothing could be more surprising or more perfect—just like in most of the great stories. It doesn’t mean a plot twist necessarily; only the perfect and paradoxical fulfillment of all that had been set up before. I always think of story endings in that way, daring them to “surprise me.” Irony is, if they surprise me at first, they will continue to surprise me with new insights on each reread, and forever.

Beautiful Friendships

It’s a bit of a joke in our family how much I love friendship/buddy stories—bromances. My favorite opera is Don Carlos (or Don Carlo, in the Italian), and I’d like to say it is for the incomparable music. But honestly, it probably has the edge because it is a bromance. Recently we were having a movie night with one of my brothers who was visiting from out of town and were trying to decide what to watch. Wanting to introduce us to Once Upon a Time in Hollywood but knowing my very mixed (at best) feelings about Tarantino, he argued, “But Rach, it’s a bromance!” Well, of course, he had me at that—and it was.

The Lord of the Rings is a feast of bromances, the possibilities endless—Merry and Pippin, Aragorn and Gandalf, Legolas and Gimli—but none are stronger nor more poignant than that of Frodo and Sam. Sam is the consummate faithful friend, like Rodrigo to Carlo. In Don Carlo(s), Rodrigo is by far my favorite character: he is both loyal, brave, his sights set on both relieving Carlo of his melancholy, Wertheresque personal trauma and struggles, as well as giving aid to the people of Flanders who are suffering under heavy-handed rule. Rodrigo—differing a bit from the Schiller original which paints him as a somewhat greyer character—is both the unquestionable hero of the story, and also the one I want to be, given the choice. (I used to joke about making a t-shirt that reads, I want to be Rodrigo when I grow up.)

In The Lord of the Rings however, there is no either-or, and the true heroism is less easy to define. All the characters have their moment; all of our central Fellowship are heroes in their own unique ways. Sam is certainly the type of unsung hero that Tolkien modeled after the “batmen” of World War I, those brave and loyal attendants who were assigned to officers as an aide. Sam is certainly the character I want to be; though not as clearly my favorite vis-à-vis Frodo as Rodrigo to Carlo; rather, I want to be him because I so dearly love Frodo. Like Aragorn’s near-whisper in the Peter Jackson film, a cry of soldiering on when they believe all hope has been lost, “for Frodo.” We’ll keep fighting, though there is no apparent hope left, to honor Frodo’s sacrifice.

Surely there is hardly a braver moment than when Sam believes his master dead and takes the Ring himself, with only one final glimpse of beauty to go by. “And for a moment he lifted up the Phial and looked down at his master, and the light burned gently now with the soft radiance of the evening-star in summer, and in that light Frodo’s face was fair of hue again, pale but beautiful with an elvish beauty, as of one who has long passed the shadows. And with the bitter comfort of that last sight Sam turned and hid the light and stumbled on into the growing dark” (“The Choices of Master Samwise,” The Two Towers).

Sam is, rightfully, the favorite character of so many; many say that he’s “the true hero” of LotR. Tolkien himself probably wouldn’t disagree; I feel there even may be some acknowledgement of this in one of his letters, but I’ll have to revisit the entirety of them to be sure. What an earlier letter on the subject does state, though, is that he believed, at least earlier on, that “Sam is the most closely drawn character”; that Frodo is less interesting because “he has to be highminded” (December 1944). I don’t disagree either with the Sam-as-the-true-hero idea entirely; yet it always gives me a strange pang when I read or hear those words. If I have anything remotely Sam-like in me, perhaps it is in that instinct to protect Frodo, and to be heartbroken about his master’s woundedness.

The Failure of Frodo

One of the many things that interests me on this subject—and I want to reread the letters in their entirety to see if I am remembering correctly—is whether or not Tolkien’s view of Frodo begins to morph with the years. I think it does. Not so much to change as to deepen. Tolkien’s defense of Frodo, beginning with an attack on his character by a severe critic of our Ring-bearer in the mid-1950s, is repeated several times, becoming more and more fully explored in depth as the years progress. But more on that shortly.

When I was very young and The Lord of the Rings was still relatively new to me, I almost didn’t see the obvious: how exactly the Ring was cast into the fire at long last, and why it ended so perfectly and so sadly. Or rather, I saw it, but couldn’t yet fully comprehend the implications of it. (It is why, I personally believe, Lewis wrote, “here is a book that will break your heart.”) Frodo hadn’t, indeed, after so much suffering, heroically doffed the Ring to toss it into the fiery furnace and rid the world of evil. It wasn’t Frodo’s great will and superhuman strength that won the day, but something far more hidden, in the ordinary paths of the journey and the choices he had made all along: the mercy and the pure-hearted endurance of long suffering leading up to it. This mercy allowed the character who had both helped and hindered them, Gollum, to tear it away from Frodo—to save Frodo from himself.

The important thing was that Frodo had set out to do it in the first place, and endured. We might say it allowed the workings of grace to enter in, and a Power stronger than all of the Fellowship combined could then take over. Tolkien put it this way in September 1954: “It is the Pity of Bilbo and later Frodo that ultimately allows the Quest to be achieved.” And later, defending Frodo in 1956, Tolkien wrote in a drafted letter: “He [Frodo] (and the Cause) were saved—by Mercy: by the supreme value and efficacy of Pity and forgiveness of injury.” Even our dear Sam couldn’t go so far as this, and Tolkien’s letters makes clear where Sam’s lovably dogged loyalty has its own Achilles heel, when discussing the things that moved him most personally in the story: “For myself, I was prob. most moved by Sam’s disquisition on the seamless web of story, and by the scene when Frodo goes to sleep on his breast, and the tragedy of Gollum who at that moment came within a hair of repentance—but for one rough word from Sam” (January 1945). Yet perhaps even that bit of folly was worked to the good, in the end.

But I didn’t see all of this yet; so, early on, I had attended a lecture at our local library on the subject of The Lord of the Rings. I can’t recall what the specific argument or gist of the lecture was, nor almost anything of what he said, perhaps because I left with two harsh words ringing in my ears like a death knell: “Frodo failed.” (What? What are you talking about?) I recall feeling utterly bereft and heartbroken, as though someone had just disparaged a dear friend whose bravery was so close to my heart and whose sufferings had been overlooked. I remember leaving the lecture so disheartened that I started crying soon after. Perhaps I was even a little angry at Tolkien for ending it in that way? Or perhaps something was calling out to me, beset by my own failures and/or fear of impending failure—who knows? But it took a long time to reconcile this strange idea—the idea of his failure—with my certainty of the great beauty of Frodo’s sacrifice, and victory.

Why did Tolkien write it that way? Why couldn’t Frodo have just been the unequivocal hero? What is shown again and again through the progression of the novels is that Frodo is clearly more immune to the power of the Ring (until its power has grown in relation to its proximity to Mordor, and Frodo’s own strength systematically and progressively depleted in the struggle) than anyone else—perhaps only Tom Bombadil excepted. (One who took it arguably too lightly—not that I would Dare challenge Blessed Tom B!) Frodo had kept it “secret” and “safe” for years without using it. (If I’m not mistaken, seventeen years pass in the book, whereas it is condensed in the movie.) He had asked multiple people to take it from him. Even our beloved Sam is tempted almost right away during his short stint as Ring-bearer, and feels the physical and moral weight of it bearing down on him.

So, if Frodo didn’t have the strength to withstand it when the Ring’s power was at its zenith, after a journey that must have felt like a “long defeat”—Tolkien’s own words about the world’s history—who could?

The answer: No one.

Ultimately, it was time, rereading, and Tolkien’s Letters—the latter I cannot possibly recommend strongly enough—that helped me to reconcile all these things. And even to grapple with the beautiful but often heartbreakingly-sad world we live in. My battered copy of the Letters is filled with many underlinings and marginal notes and enthusiastic teenage exclamation points (okay, so I still do that and may never grow up). Tolkien is not only a genius and a marvelous letter writer and linguistic nerd, but he is a mystic. So many of his letters—particularly some of those to his sons, Christopher and Michael—demonstrate this so luminously. In them we find his fascinations explored in more depth, as well as his faith, and even his fears. On the fear of publication, for example, he puts into words what any creative person can relate to: “I have exposed my heart to be shot at” (December 1953).

And, sure enough, Tolkien found himself in the position of defending Frodo against an angry critic of LotR, who had bitingly declared that Frodo was a scoundrel and a traitor; that he should have been hung rather than honored. (Tolkien was to write in a letter of July 1956, on persons of this mindset: “It seems sad and strange that, in this evil time when daily people of good will are tortured, ‘brainwashed’, and broken, anyone could be so fiercely simpleminded and selfrighteous.”)

Tolkien does not beat about the bush, but says clearly: “No, Frodo ‘failed’. It is possible that once the ring was destroyed he had little recollection of the last scene. But one must face the fact: the power of Evil in the world is not finally resistible by incarnate creatures, however ‘good’; and the Writer of the Story is not one of us” (July 1956). In other words, Frodo took upon himself, out of love for his friends and the Shire, what only God himself could hope to do with success, and he went as far, and further, than it was humanly—or hobbitly—possible to go. What Tolkien reflected on in answer to the charge against Frodo, was the too-often neglected implication of those words in the Lord’s Prayer: “Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.” Tolkien writes (italics mine): “A petition against something that cannot happen is unmeaning. There exists the possibility of being placed in positions beyond one’s power. In which case (as I believe) salvation from ruin will depend on something apparently unconnected: the general sanctity (and humility and mercy) of the sacrificial person.”

Further than that, Tolkien says in a letter of the same month: “We must be ourselves extravagantly generous, if we are to hope for the extravagant generosity which the slightest easing of, or escape from, the consequences of our own follies and errors represents. And that mercy does sometimes occur in this life.” And again: “I think you will see that not only was it quite impossible for him to surrender the Ring, in act or will, especially at its point of maximum power, but that this failure was adumbrated from far back. He was honoured because he had accepted the burden voluntarily, and had then done all that was within his utmost physical and mental strength to do.”

In another letter he phrases it a little differently, and with a bang (italics mine): “Frodo deserved all honour because he spent every drop of his power of will and body, and that was just sufficient to bring him to the destined point, and no further. Few others, possibly no others of his time, would have got so far. The Other Power then took over: the Writer of the Story (by which I do not mean myself), ‘that one ever present Person who is never absent and never named’.”

“I am wounded…wounded; it will never really heal.”

Ultimately, as Tolkien writes, “there cannot be any ‘story’ without a fall—all stories are ultimately about the fall” (late-1951). (Perhaps a person of faith can only respond not with hope of human victory, but with a greater one, and say with the Exultet, “O happy fault…”)

Frodo has basically given up his whole life, during the journey and after, for his friends, yet he doesn’t get to enjoy the fruits of victory. Ostensibly, it is the wound from the Morgul-blade, never fully healed, which prevents Frodo from remaining in the Shire and living any kind of a “normal” life; a life with his close hobbit friends, or with a Rosie Cotton of his own, and with little ones. Yet the Morgul-blade isn’t the real, insurmountable wound that he carries: more likely, it is the woundedness of failure. Of what he perceives to have been his own failure. Tolkien writes, in February 1956: “I think that ‘victors’ never can enjoy ‘victory’—not in the terms that they envisaged; and in so far as they fought for something to be enjoyed by themselves (whether acquisition or mere preservation) the less satisfactory will ‘victory’ seem.”

Perhaps our perceived failures are the only means by which we learn humility, and give credit where credit is due: to the Writer of the Story, without whom victory would be, quite literally, impossible. “Frodo undertook his quest out of love,” writes Tolkien in September of 1963, “to save the world he knew from disaster at his own expense, if he could; and also in complete humility, acknowledging that he was wholly inadequate to the task…I do not myself see that the breaking of his mind and will under demonic pressure after torment was any more a moral failure than the breaking of his body would have been—say, by being strangled by Gollum, or crushed by a falling rock.”

Tolkien then goes on in the same letter to consider Frodo’s somewhat obscure frame of mind post-Mount Doom: “He appears at first to have had no sense of guilt; he was restored to sanity and peace. But then he thought that he had given his life in sacrifice: he expected to die very soon. But he did not, and one can observe the disquiet growing in him. Arwen was the first to observe the signs, and gave him her jewel for comfort, and thought of a way of healing him. Slowly he fades ‘out of the picture’, saying and doing less and less. I think it is clear on reflection to an attentive reader that when his dark times came upon him…he was conscious of being ‘wounded’…”

In the chapter The Grey Havens at the end of The Return of the King, Sam begins to weep when he realizes what Frodo means to do—to leave the Shire—and protests that he hoped Frodo would have been able to enjoy it for many years to come. “I thought so too, once,” Frodo answers. “But I have been too deeply hurt, Sam. I tried to save the Shire, and it has been saved, but not for me.” Those heartbreakingly telling little clues: I tried; it has been saved—one can almost hear in the “but not for me” instead: “but not by me.” His own beauty is hidden; the mercy that saved himself and the world, he hardly dares give to himself.

Perhaps we too keep too little hope or mercy for ourselves. Frodo was innocent, and heroic, in failure; we aren’t always so. Sometimes it is something beyond our control, and sometimes our failures are fully intended and willed, or at least preventable. Often, it is something of both. Perhaps that is why we love Sam so dearly; because we could all use a Sam—one who stands by us, no matter what; one who knows us through and through, and sticks by us anyway. Frodo, though his soul is almost “beauty too rich for use, for earth too dear,” in some ways he hits too close to home (Romeo and Juliet, I.v). Sam’s courage and path is clear: he must go where his master goes, and there is no wavering. Frodo’s burden, on the other hand, is so immensely solitary, fighting shadows and his own demons and the very presence of Evil itself in the world, bound as he is on a (humanly/hobbitly speaking) hopeless quest. And we would all like to be the unequivocal hero, and go home mentally and spiritually unfettered, to Rosie Cotton and Bag End, at the end.

But ultimately, victory is not ours. We press on, notwithstanding, for the sake of our friends and for what we love.

So, I suppose, difficult as it is for me to acknowledge a favorite character in The Lord of the Rings, I really know in my heart who it is. If I want to be Sam, it is for the same reason that the Fellowship fights on even when hope has fled in the midst of almost-certain defeat: it is for my own hero and for my love of all that is beautiful in the world. It is for Frodo.