Frodo's Failure

Some of you have read the book, others have only seen the movie, perhaps some of you are familiar with neither the blockbuster nor the classic in which Frodo the hobbit must carry a ring, permeated with evil power, up to the summit of mount doom and drop it into a crack so that it might be destroyed by the fire below. By the time you reach that point in the story, the quest for mount doom has become almost as much of a burden for the reader as for the hero, and all you want is for him to let go of that ring and be free. If you care at all, if you're invested enough in the recognizability of the tale, then you're tired of reading about his struggle and his weariness, almost as if you yourself are helping to carry the ring just by sharing his story.

But if you persevere that far you will experience something like a shocking surprise. This hardy little hobbit has braved all the dangers of middle earth and all the deprivations one could reasonably expect only to reach the very end of his journey... and fail.

He failed, no question about it. His role was to take the ring to the mountain and destroy it. Instead, he tried to claim it and keep it. He'd carried it around his neck for too long; it had seeped into his flesh and bones, and it had become a part of him. As he slips it on his finger the reader realizes that even the strongest and the bravest cannot endure the mounting pressure of evil forever. Everyone crumbles beneath it at some point.

It is just then, when Frodo disappears into a world of shadow and darkness, and his good friend can no longer even see him, when the creature who has dogged his footsteps for nearly the entire trip reaches out to take the ring for himself. He finds Frodo's finger and bites it off, taking his prize with a cannibalistic violence. Then this creature, Gollum, falls, ring and all, into the fire - and Frodo is left staring into the abyss.

Here Frodo becomes free, but not for anything he himself did. He tried to get rid of his burden, but he could not. In the end he embraced it, and at that point, when it had become a part of himself, it could only be taken from him at the price of disfigurement. A small piece of himself fell into the flames as well. He may have been set free from the power of the ring, but he would never be completely whole again.

There is something deeply disturbing about the suggestion that the kindest, bravest, hardiest character in an epic is insufficiently strong to resist evil all alone - that even the best of us is ultimately corruptible. The idea that a vulnerability to darkness may linger inside of us, and can only be torn away in a violent act of mercy which hurts more deeply the more it is needed. The flesh is weak indeed. As Frodo runs from the scene of his own failure, dripping blood and exhausted, he may indeed have felt as though he were dying; yet he can hardly have regretted it. Can such a survivor ever regret what he's lost, or left behind, the pieces of his heart or his soul that have been destroyed in the course of things? So long as the curse is lifted, nothing else matters. It is enough.