Frodo at Sammath Naur

[Child of the 7th Age]

Helen,

I'm not sure if we are seeing this differently or there is just a problem with language here. Let me elaborate and you can let me know whether you agree or not.

I agree that Frodo should not be judged for his decision at Sammath Naur, any more than he would be judged for a boulder falling onto his head.

And I also agree that when Frodo first trudged up that slope, he had no plan or intention to use the Ring to save anything. I'm sure he had rejected any tempting thoughts of rule that had ever crept into his mind (but I do believe they had crept in at some point along the trail, only to be rejected.) It was only standing at the very crack that he actually decided to claim the Ring.

But what I was trying to answer was this (a question that was mentioned earlier on the thread): why did Frodo claim the Ring at that particular moment? Was it mere possessiveness for the Ring itself, as seems to have been true with Gollum, or a conscious desire to claim it to do something?

As can be seen from my last post, Tolkien's earlier drafts for the chapter clearly state that Frodo claimed the Ring because he wanted to do something with it: he wanted to rule.....a rule that would be gentle, filled with poetry and feasts. That language does not appear in the final chapter. Yet while the ideas may have disappeared from the chapter, he never contradicted or refuted them (as was true with other scenarios such as Sam pushing in Gollum or Gollum repenting). Frodo's intentions were still there at the back of Tolkien's mind, a fact we can clearly see by studying the Letters.

In my earlier post, I mentioned that Frodo is grieving that he can't be a hero, only an agent of providence: something that Tolkien explicitly mentioned in his earlier draft and his Letters. The statement from the Letters is well known; on Frodo's desire as expressed in JRRT's earlier draft see this:

After all he is a great hero, Hobbits should become lords of men, and he their Lord, King Frodo, Emperor Frodo.

In her last post, Lyta Underhill came up with an even stronger argument than mine. It is based on Letter 246: the reference to the Ringwraiths bowing low and Frodo's dreams of reformed rule.

They (the Ringwraiths) would have greeted Frodo as 'Lord'. With fair speeches they would have induced him to look upon his new kingdom, and behold afar with his new sight the abode of power that he must now claim and turn to his own purposes'. Once outside the chamber while he was gazing some of them would have destroyed the entrance. Frodo would by then probably have been already too enmeshed in great plans of reformed rule--like but far greater and wider than the vision that tempted Sam--to heed this.

My apologies to Lyta for 'stealing' her quote! But it clearly implies what I am trying to say. Based on the Letters and the earlier drafts of the chapter, it's clear Frodo had ideas of "reformed rule" in mind when he claimed the Ring. It was not simply the Ring itself, as was true with Gollum.

This all suggests that Tolkien may have deleted the specific reasons why Frodo claimed the Ring, but that it was more than desire for the thing itself -- he had intentions of claiming power.

I do think Frodo must have run many ideas through his head on the journey, including saving the Shire, and then firmly rejected them. If you had asked Frodo in Lothlorien what he intended to do, he would not have hesitated even a single second to say that he was going to destroy it, in terms that were swifter and more certain than Galadriel's. He was absolutely certain that he wanted to throw away the Ring until he stood on the very steps of Mount Doom. There, in the seat or womb of all evil, other thoughts took over: he desired both the Ring and what that would enable him to do.

As to the question of Bilbo and preserving the Shire....we can never be sure. This is admittedly conjecture based on the nature of Frodo's personality and his 'Elvish' nature. But it sounds likely to me that any reformed rule Frodo envisioned would have surely included Bilbo and a 'preserved' Shire as well.

<font size=1 color=339966>[ 11:52 AM January 19, 2004: Message edited by: Child of the 7th Age ]