Child,
Ok, but what do we mean (or, specifically, what did Tolkien mean) by 'healing'?
Are we talking physical healing alone, mental healing or spiritual healing, or all three?
I know that somewhere Tolkien says something about Frodo having been 'broken' by a burden too great for him to carry, & made into something greater.
In other words, 'Frodo Baggins', hobbit of the Shire, is destroyed by the Quest - in effect, what he had 'hoped' for - to die in achieving the Quest - had come about. The person who comes back to the Shire is someone else altogether - Saruman tells him he has grown. I suppose the question is, 'who' is being healed in the Undying Lands? If Frodo is no longer what he was, what has he become, & what form of healing will be necessary for this new Frodo to be made whole. The sense I get from the book, is that Frodo is not going over sea with the expectation of being healed - I'm not even sure he even has any hope of it. I think (whatever occurs when he gets there) he is going principally because he cannot stay in ME any longer - he's running from not running to.
It is, perhaps, another example of 'hope without guarantees' - though how much hope Frodo has is the question. Thinking about it, I almost get the sense that he is so broken, hurt, confused, that he is almost running blindly into the West, because he can't think of anything else to do. Frodo is completely destroyed by the Quest, but he's still sentient, which makes it more horrible. The old security of life in the Shire must have made no sense anymore - probably nothing made any more sense. 'Who' is left, the person who comes back to the Shire, is maybe a question only someone who had seen the horror & loss of war could answer. Tolkien moves Frodo 'off stage' - maybe he felt unable to deal with the result of Frodo's suffering, or maybe he was admitting that it isn't possible to deal with that level of suffering.
Can we really speculate on what becomes of Frodo in the West? What would a 'healed' Frodo be like? What he had been before the Quest? But then what kind of person would he have been? & would the 'healing' he recieved be the healing he had wished for? He had grown, but what he had grown into was something he had had no say in, something forced on him. He was made into something other, different, maybe from a spiritual perspective, a 'better' person, but is it what he would have wanted? Is Illuvatar using such terrible suffering to 'force' Frodo to grow, & is that necessary - the only way that we can grow spiritually?
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