(THE CONSEQUENCES OF) FREE AND GOOD WILL

( THE CONSEQUENCES OF )

FREE AND GOOD WILL

Note: This was written for the April 30th class "Creativity & Free Will III"

After a first read, The Lord of the Rings looks like a story about free will triumphing over domination. This is technically true, but Mount Doom makes the answer messier. Frodo freely chooses to bear the Ring at the Council of Elrond, freely chooses to leave the Fellowship, and chooses again and again to keep moving toward Mordor; yet when he finally reaches the Crack of Doom, he cannot destroy it. Tolkien admits in Letter 246 that this failure was real but not exactly moral: at the Ring’s maximum pressure, no one could have resisted. As Shippey argues in “Interlacements and the Ring,” the Ring’s fate depends not only on Frodo’s final act but on earlier decisions by Bilbo, Sam, Gollum, and Gandalf (Road to Middle-earth, 153–98). In other words, free will matters constantly in the story, but it cannot close the story by itself.

"I do not lay it on you. But if you take it freely, I will say that your choice is right."  

Elrond to Frodo, The Fellowship of the Ring, bk. II, ch. 2

Frodo is not dragged into the quest. Tolkien knew that his choice had to be his own, or it would have no moral weight. But characters in his story almost never choose with the whole map in front of them. They choose with limited information under pressure, without knowing how their choices will land. That is where Shippey’s point about interlacement becomes useful. Bilbo’s pity for Gollum seems almost incidental when Gandalf first explains it, but it becomes a hidden precondition for the Ring’s destruction. Frodo’s pity works the same way. He does not spare Gollum because he somehow knows Gollum will matter at the end. He spares him because killing him would mean accepting the Ring’s own logic: mastery, judgment, possession. That free choice, made without guarantee, is what saves the quest after Frodo himself cannot.

“Then do not be too eager to deal out death in judgement. For even the very wise cannot see all ends.”

Gandalf to Frodo, The Fellowship of the Ring, bk. I, ch. 2 

Frodo doesn't spare Gollum because he knows he will be the deciding factor in the quest to destroy the ring,The Ring tempts by promising to end that uncertainty. It offers the fantasy that if someone had enough power, outcomes could finally be controlled. Boromir wants it to save Gondor; Gandalf and Galadriel both know they would want it for ends they would call good. Letter 246 is especially sharp here: Gandalf as Ring-Lord would have remained "righteous," but self-righteous, arranging the world for its own benefit according to his wisdom. Sauron’s evil at least makes the battle lines clear. Gandalf’s version would be worse because it would make tyranny look like goodness. That is the Ring’s most dangerous temptation: not crude selfishness, but the belief that your own goodness gives you the right to rule other wills.

When Sam takes the Ring because he thinks Frodo is dead, he briefly imagines turning Mordor into a garden, but the vision doesn’t really take hold because Sam is attached to Frodo, not to the world the Ring says he could build. He and Gollum mirror each other well here. Both call someone "master." Both structure their lives around another will. But Gollum’s loyalty is finally to the Ring, while Sam’s is to a person.

In this regard we cannot brush aside one of Tolkien's defining traits: His religion. Tolkien was a Catholic working in an Augustinian tradition where the will is truly free and truly insufficient, where grace is not a prize for effort but the thing that makes effort matter at all. Mount Doom dramatizes that doctrine. Grace destroys the Ring through Gollum’s fall. Grace heals Frodo through the gift of the West. Neither outcome is earned in the clean, heroic sense. Free will gets Frodo to the crack of Mount Doom, and when he falls short at the end, it's the consequences of his free and good willed actions that destroy the ring when he cannot.

Which brings us back to Mount Doom. Frodo chooses the road, spares Gollum, trusts Sam, and carries the Ring farther than any other bearer could have, and then succumbs to it literally steps away from triumph. The will that got him there cannot finish the job. But his earlier choices outlive that final failure. Because Bilbo pitied Gollum, because Frodo pitied Gollum, because Sam stayed, the “accident” at the Crack of Doom becomes possible. Frodo’s failure is not free of consequence, either. He comes home to the Shire and cannot really enjoy what he saved. Tolkien describes this in Letter 246 as "unreasoning self-reproach": Frodo sees himself as broken and guilty, even though he did everything that could have been asked of him. By the end, he tells Sam plainly: "I tried to save the Shire, and it has been saved, but not for me." The only remedy is passage over the Sea, which is not something Frodo can force into being. It is given.

-LR