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Originally Posted by Legolas
I'm not sure why you quoted me,
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I suppose I was responding to what you said about how it might appear if the other Hobbits had come back to Rivendell to tell Bilbo about Frodo's death. It immediately brought to mind the situation of fellow servicemen coming home to tell those left what had happened to their relatives. How that led into what else I said, that's just Lalwende Logic...
To me, it makes perfect sense that Frodo came back alive but broken. He demonstrated the effects of the Ring to others, he acted as Tolkien's 'sacrificial' figure, and the end was all the more bittersweet. There was the relief that Frodo lived, but then the horror of what had happened to him; the world was changed after the Ring was destroyed, and in that sense, Frodo was emblematic of that change.
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Originally Posted by SpM
I have a very clear memory of thinking, when I was first reading LotR, what an anti-climax it would be if they made it to Mount Doom and simply threw the Ring in. Notwothstanding the travails of actually getting to Orodruin, it would just have seemed too easy. Perversely, therefore, I was actually rather relieved when Frodo claimed the Ring as his own and refused to destroy it. In consequence, the events of Sammath Naur were (and remain) utterly compelling to me and thankfully brought no sense of anti-climax whatsoever.
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I don't remember thinking that clearly about the end! I was probably just thinking "whoa!" at the time.
But afterwards, it always stayed with me as an incredible climax to the story. At that age I was used to the traditional 'happy ending' to a story, and on one level, LOTR does have a happy ending - Frodo Lives! And then he gets to go and live with the Elves! I remember thinking wow...they all live happily ever after. But it isn't really like that at all. That only struck me some time after finishing the book. I now think it is the perfect ending to the story, and even more, that Gollum's death was the perfect way for his character to be 'signed off'.
I wonder would Gollum still have been the one to destroy the Ring if Frodo had died at Cirith Ungol? I don't honestly think it would have been possible, and so we would have lost that perfcet ending.