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Frodo's Temptation and The Wound That Wouldn't Heal

© Douglas Charles Rapier

In September of 1963, JRR Tolkien drafted a response to a reader's assertion that Frodo had failed in his quest because he had not willingly surrendered or destroyed the Ring in the Cracks of Doom. ('The Letters of JRR Tolkien', H. Carpenter editor, letter #246) Although the 'Lord of the Rings' had been published in 1955, only two people had written to the Professor and shared this observation with him. His drafted response runs more than seven typeset, foot-noted pages.

Since then, there has been on on-going, albeit sporadic, debate on this subject and since the release of Peter Jackson's films, this line of discussion has intensified appreciably. At the extreme end of this polemic are those who would discredit the entire story of Frodo and the Ring because of what they perceive to be his failure to carry his task to its completion. Anyone the least curious as to the opinion of Tolkien to this matter would do well to read the aforementioned draft. No better nor more convincing explanation or exoneration of Frodo's act of weakness in that critical moment need be sought.

As I read Tolkien's drafts of his response, I had a near epiphenomenal realization concerning the enormity of the task Frodo undertook as the bearer of the Ring of Doom. For, not only did Frodo come forward at the Council of Elrond, and pledge to carry the Ring to its destruction knowing full well if the Ring were not destroyed, the most dire and unspeakable consequences would engulf all of Middle-earth, he chose to shoulder the weight of this awesome responsibility with a newly-found understanding of the pernicious power of the Ring to delude, manipulate and consume him with temptation, the temptation to wear the Ring and to claim it as his own, as its master. That understanding began with the fateful lesson learned by Frodo on Weathertop.

Before examining that episode, the nature of the One Ring needs to be examined. The Ring was not just a conjuror's device, of course. Its most rudimentary power was the conferring of invisibility to its wearer, this is true, but the One Ring itself was the repository of Sauron's virulent will and might. As Gandalf states in 'The Shadow of the Past', Book One of 'The Lord of the Rings', "...he (Sauron) let a great part of his own former power pass into it,..." At the forging of the One Ring by Sauron, The Ring of Power became the analogue, the doppelganger of Sauron as he was in the Second Age, the Lord of the Earth.