But he still claims the Ring. 'The Ring is mine' is more than a simple statement of ownership. It is not his, it never was, so that statement is a lie. He becomes a thief, taking & claiming as his own something which he has no right to. He gives in, on some level, makes a claim which excludes all his responsibilities to others. For all Tolkien's defense of Frodo in the letters he still states that Frodo is going into the West as a 'reward and a purgatory'. His fall, his 'sin' is inevitable, because by the end the Ring has had so much time to break him down, twist his perceptions, but on some level he knows what he has done. He set himself a task too great for him to achieve & was broken by the attempt. The extent to which he came to identify with the Ring, so that his statement 'The Ring is mine' is the same as 'I and the Ring are one. I am the Ring' is open to question. At the same time, Frodo is a free being & there must be assent, some surrender, at the end. The fact he can still speak of 'I' & 'mine' confirms this, as far as I'm concerned. The old Frodo is still 'in there'.
His 'sin' is tiny, & he cannot be blamed for it, but the consequences of it could have been terrible - hence his increasing feelings of guilt & failure. When he returns to the Shire & sees the devastation there, he knows that his claiming the Ring would have brought the whole of Middle Earth to that state. Think what must go through his mind at that point. Saruman may be responsible for the devastation of the Shire, but execpt for the 'Grace of God', the intervention of The Authority, Frodo could have been responsible for doing that to the whole of Middle Earth. At the Sammath Naur it was a little step to claim the ring as his own, but it was a step that could have brought the whole world to ruin, & Frodo knows it. The Ring is gone, & all is dark & empty, but Frodo's innocence is also gone. He knows himself, & cannot live with what he has learned. The task was too great, & should never have been given to him, because it was inevitable he would fail to achieve it, & that he would be broken by it. Tolkien is showing us a deep truth about ourselves & about The Authority.
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