Is Frodo the hero of The Lord of the Rings? In many ways, he
is not – as discussed in class, Frodo does not get the happy, “heroic” ending that
many other characters get. Sam settles down with the girl he had a hopeless
crush on, has 14 kids, and lives out his days as mayor. Aragorn marries the
princess, becomes king, and has the happily ever after of fairytale dreams.
Frodo succumbs to the ring at the last moment – only saved by Gollum -- and returns
home to find himself so utterly changed he no longer belongs.
On the Fields of Cormallen, for a brief moment in the story,
Frodo is a hero. Aragorn pulls him to the right of him and calls upon all the
men and captains to “Praise them with great praise!”. And a minstrel of Gondor sings
“‘For I will sing to you of Frodo of the Nine Fingers and the Ring of Doom’”
Frodo is the titular character of a great poem!
Yet Frodo is not a hero in the Shire. Sam says, in the end
of the Return of the King that “Frodo dropped quietly out of all the doings of
the Shire, and Sam was pained to notice how little honour he had in his own
country. Few people knew or wanted to know about his deeds and adventures;
their admiration and respect were given mostly to Mr. Meriadoc and Mr. Peregrin
and (if Sam had known it) to himself.” Frodo loses this honour upon entering Shire:
it is Merry, Pippin and Sam that gain the prestige of their mission. Frodo
cannot translate his journey into the leadership and community that the rest of
the friends do. Instead, it consumes and isolates him.
In their last conversation, Frodo consoles Sam on his departure,
and says that “‘Your time may come. Do not be too sad, Sam. You cannot be
always torn in two. You will have to be one and whole, for many years. You have
so much to enjoy and to be, and to do,’”. Frodo is, in the completion of his
quest, literally torn in two: Gollum permanently bites off his finger. He is,
as he tells Sam “too deeply hurt, Sam. I tried to save the Shire, and it has
been saved, but not for me. It must often be so, Sam, when things are in
danger: some one has to give them up, lose them, so that others may keep them.”
Frodo is, in a way that wanders from the path of the usual hero’s journey, changed
in a way that does not allow him to go home.
Frodo’s journey also drifts from the original fairy tale
setup established by Tolkien in Tree and Leaf: that the true form of the fairy-tale
is the “eucatastrophic tale”, where “the joy of the happy ending: or more
correctly of the good catastrophe, the sudden joyous “turn””. Essential to the
fairy tale is this turn, which allows this relief, “a catch of the breath, a
beat and lifting of the heart” to any man listening to it “however wild its
events, however fantastic or terrible the adventures”.
Frodo has no true turn, no eucatastrophic ending. At best he
ends his journey accepting his permanent loss. In the Shire, he does not become
a hero of the old ways, fighting and leading. He tries to prevent bloodlust. Tolkien
says in his letter to Christopher Tolkien, of the dangers of war that “But so
short is human memory and so evanescent are its generations that in only about
thirty years there will be few or no people with that direct experience which
alone goes really to the heart. The burnt hand teaches the most about fire”. The
ills of war are not only often felt primarily by the soldiers, but even
they forget and go on to glamorize them. Frodo has seen the dangers of war, and
comes away as Tolkien does: dispirited and disturbed by it, even as memory
fades.
Shippey writes that Bilbo is a modern character in a fantasy
setting. Frodo is, much like Bilbo, a modern hero among fantastical ones. Tolkien
says in letter five on Rob’s death that “I feel just the same to both of you –
nearer if anything and very much in need of you – I am hungry and lonely of
course – but I don’t feel a member of a little complete body now”. Just as
Frodo is repeatedly described in the end of the book to be never again whole,
Tolkien described the losses of the Great War.
Tolkien longs to write a mythology for England. But he could
not make Frodo the mythological hero. He bemoans to Christopher in his letter “The
utter stupid waste of war, not only material but moral and spiritual, is so
staggering to those who have to endure it. And always was (despite the poets)
and always will be (despite the propagandists) – not of course that it has not
is and will be necessary to face it in an evil world.” Frodo is, on the Fields
of Cormallen, a hero spoken of in a poem. But when Frodo falls ill during Spring
in the Shire, and says to Farmer Cotton, while clutching his neck that “It is
gone for ever, he said, ‘and now all is dark and empty’”, we see his journey end
not in the “eucatastrophe” of a fairy tale, but in the moral and spiritual loss
of war.
Merry, at the spot where they “all started out together”
says that “It seems almost like a dream that has slowly faded”. But Frodo has
seen the evil of the world, the waste of war. To go back to where they are “To me
it feels more like falling asleep again.”
- ZJ
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