Child, Lyta, I agree with both of you. As I said, I'm fumbling after something. The Athrabeth is as clear a statement as Tolkien ever made within his fiction that 'salvation' - whatever you concieve that to mean - can only come from outside, beyond the circles of the world, by the intervention of an external force, therefore, dependence on/faith in any worldly object will only bring failure & ultimately a loss of any kind of hope. Frodo, I think gives in to despair at the end simply because he can no longer see anything beyond the Ring, which is perhaps the 'World', materialism, the Machine. He becomes convinced that the world can olny be saved by something within the world. This is not to say that any of us, having been through what he had, would have been able to do any differently. But is Tolkien saying that that is our nature as fallen beings - that if pushed beyond our limits we will all fall into materialism & rejection of the Authority? He relates the incident at the Sammath Naur to the lines in the Lord's Prayer, but perhaps (though maybe he would not have presumed to state it) he has in mind Christ's cry 'My God, My God, Why have you forsaken me?' Perhaps Frodo is at that point of ultimate despair, but whereas the divine Christ can still trust, even in a God he percieves as 'absent', the 'human' Frodo cannot. Frodo 'fails' because he must, because he cannot succeed. Maybe Tolkien is pointing up the inevitability of human failure, that Frodo is not the 'Christ' figure that too many casual readers (& some not so casual, like Humphrey Carpenter) interpret him as. Perhaps it is Tolkien's faith that requires Frodo's ultimate failure at that point. If anything truly 'foreshadows' Frodo's failure at the end perhaps that's it. LotR is the work of a Christian - how could Frodo succeed?
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