Hey
Ivriniel, thanks for throwing your kindling thoughts on these grey embers!
Yep, I think your younger self was a bit harsh on poor Frodo, but I think I see how you got there. We see the whole journey to and through Mordor mostly through Sam's eyes and are thus 'once removed' from Frodo, so to say, maybe even estranged. We pity him and fear and hope for him because Sam does, but it's Sam we identify with. Of Frodo's inner struggles we see only glimpses - the fiery wheel, his memories of the Shire fading - , until at last we get hit on the head with "The ring is mine". (Not quite unlike, I'd say, the way Donaldson passes the camera from Covenant to Linden at times, e.g. when C. was Silenced by the Elohim, so we don't know what's going on inside him, and then hits us on the head with "Nom." - another mindblowing moment!
You know, I think I have an idea how Donaldson came up with all this externalisation stuff. In his foreword to, I think it was Gap into Conflict - The Real Story, he explains that every book he writes is born from the combination of two ideas - one familiar, one strange. In the case of the Chronicles the two ideas were (obviously) leprosy and fantasy, with leprosy being the familiar one (because as a kid he watched his dad working with lepers as a doctor in India), fantasy the strange one. Maybe this was the only way he felt he could tackle writing a fantasy world: by treating it as exteriorization of inner conflict?
In many ways the Land is reminiscent of Middle-earth: sentient forests, Ents and Forestals, Elves/Dwarves and Giants, Revelstone and Rivendell, a Dark Lord and his minions (Ravers for Ringwraiths), but making it all an exteriorization or 'objective correlative' of Covenant's (and later Linden's) struggle against self-despite turns it all into something totally different and unique.
So, does anybody create Lord Foul? Covenant, as a writer, is a creator himself, and if the Land is his dream, he creates it, and everything in it, in his subconscious mind - but is it? The same Land that other people can enter - Linden, Tom, Joan, Jeremiah, it can't just be in his head, can it? Or are we looking at a metaphor for the writer-creator's power to draw others into a world of his imagination?
But this, and thinking about Aule, Sauron and craftsmen in the context of your riddle over in the Quiz Room, takes me to quite another question: Why is it that it's always the makers, artisans and (sub-)creators who are most vulnerable to the lies of Morgoth and his minions - from Sauron to Fëanor to the Gwaith-i-Mirdain to Saruman, and I'm sure I've missed a few? And where does Tolkien, as a mythopoetic subcreator, situate himself in this context - or, to vary the title of this thread a bit: Is Sauron
the author's shadow?