LotR -- Book 6 - Chapter 3 - Mount Doom

[Fordim Hedgethistle]

Hmmmm…Mister Underhill has got me to thinking about this whole love and sacrifice thing. As he aptly puts it:

the triumph of love, really, of which sacrifice is perhaps the most perfect expression.

Seems to me that a nice way of looking at Frodo’s “choice” at the Crack of Doom (and it is the weight of this choice that, as Lal so nicely puts it, breaks him) is as the choice between desire and love. Love is all about the other person or thing: “I love you.” In Frodo’s case, in that moment, his love is for Sam and the Shire – for their sake, he would throw himself into the fire, he would sacrifice himself for their sake. Desire, on the other hand, is all about the self: “I desire you for myself.” In that moment, Frodo’s desire is for the Ring, which works against his self sacrifice insofar as to kill himself is to lose the Precious. I am sure that if there had been a way for him to sacrifice himself without losing the Ring, he would have done so in a moment for it would have resolved his conflict. But of course, that option is simply not there: he has only two “choices”

1) destroy all that he loves (the Shire), or

2) destroy all that he desires (the Ring).

Now at this point, it is easy to say that given what Frodo does do (claims the Ring) he clearly is choosing to destroy all that he loves: Frodo’s supposed moral failure. But go back to the few instances in which we actually see how the Ring works on people – there was heated discussion of Sam’s Ring, and who can forget Galadriel’s vision of herself – or Gandalf’s claim that he would take the Ring out of pity and the desire to do good. Given that in each of these instances the Ring offered the potential bearer a vision of him or herself doing something for the sake of love (Sam loves gardens; Gandalf loves pity and the weak; Galadriel loves Lorien) we can only assume that the same thing was happening with Frodo (although it is fascinating to me that Tolkien makes us rely on assumption at this point! Wouldn’t this whole episode be different if we had Frodo crying out, “I will take the Ring and destroy Barad-Dur so that the Shire shall be safe forever!?).

The choice that Frodo makes is still one in favour of love: unfortunately for him, however, he has – like all victims of torture – been so reduced in his capacity to judge rightly that he is making a mistake. We, on the outside, see his choices as I’ve outlined them above, but for Frodo the choices are:

1) destroy all that he desires (the Ring), or

2) save all that he loves (the Shire) and desires (the Ring).

This is why I say that Frodo is not really making a choice at all, for that presupposes that someone is able to choose from the options as they really are, and that they are able to do so in a rational manner. This is also why I see no moral failing at this point (which is not to say that Frodo is morally infallible, just that he does not demonstrate that here). Given the choices as Frodo perceives them (thanks to the torture/trickery of the Ring) he makes the only “rational” decision at that moment. In a weird way, his claiming the Ring at that point is a demonstration of his desire to do good: for the sake of the Shire, which he loves, he will take the Ring in order to save it.

(That last point is, I realize, quite a stretcher, but one that I think useful to make even if it doesn’t really stand up for very long.)