True, but that's the extreme potency of the Ring as it reaches its point of maximum power, very near the fire where it was made.
Gollum's "bless us and splash us, my precious!" pleasure in fish and the prospect of raw goblin/Baggins is possible because the Ring is so far from Mordor.
Also Frodo is still resisting the Ring, and that is why it is torturing him to the degree it is at the point of the "wheel of fire" speech.
Whether Frodo's ability to experience emotional and physical pleasure is permanently damaged is an interesting point. Like Celebrian, he loses delight in Middle-earth, and exposure to the Ring (and the things this led to, such as his inability to renounce it in the end) is a huge part of this. The wounds he received along the way were more due to the fact of his being the Bearer, and his mission throwing him constantly into the line of fire, and they contributed too.
But I wonder how far the sensory and emotional pleasures returned once the Ring was destroyed. I would think that he was able to sense them again, but maybe some kind of detachment remained. For one thing, he deputised as Mayor once because Will Whitfoot "needed a lot of feeding up" before he could go back to presiding at banquets. Could just refer to the fact that Will was in a pretty bad way and Frodo had recovered from his physical privations, but he'd hardly be psychologically capable of attending a banquet if no sense of such pleasures had returned.
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"Sit by the firelight's glow; tell us an old tale we know. Tell of adventures strange and rare; never to change, ever to share! Stories we tell will cast their spell, now and for always."
Last edited by Pervinca Took; 07-07-2013 at 04:26 PM.
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