Happy Downfall of Sauron Day! Here's an Essay on Frodo, the Ring, and Good & Evil
Happy Downfall of Sauron Day! Remember to think before you shoot—no, that's a different fictional holiday. Coronavirus has cancelled my annual March 25th bask in the California spring, so I thought I'd celebrate with a substantial essay online instead. This is also a red-letter year in the LotR-verse in my mind: the 40th anniversary of the War of the Ring. (I've been counting this in real years since approximately high school, which, no, was not 40 years ago. My imagination had already gotten about 15 years past the war.) Finally, being back in therapy, I have been grappling with Issues, and I'm going to use LotR to talk about them, sans personal details.
With Issues in mind, I want to talk about Frodo and the Ring and the nature of evil. This train of thought arises out of discussion with my therapist over my need to develop a more stable sense of self-identity, particularly surrounding my assessment of how good or bad a person I am. So let me lay that all over Frodo… (LotR spoilers follow, if you care.)
Frodo is a good person. In fact, he is one of most well-written thoroughly good protagonists I've ever encountered. He is not quite what I call a literary "saint," in non-religiously specific terms. To me, a "saint" is called strongly to the service of others. Frodo certainly answers this call in the war, but he answers it under extreme circumstances and prompted in part by desire to postpone being parted from the Ring. In this, he is not quite a Vash the Stampede or Alyosha Karamazov or Kagetora by the end of Mirage. All things being equal, he would rather live a quiet life, or perhaps have a small adventure, while having good relationships with the people around him and otherwise not affecting things much: a quiet, ordinary person.
Yet in his quiet ordinariness, he is extraordinary. Gandalf thinks he's the best hobbit in the Shire, and he doesn't think that for nothing. Frodo's goodness is unobtrusive, but his relative lack of personal failings is remarkable. Discounting the malign influence of the Ring, I can only think of a few. Tolkien, I think, meant the most notable to be a tendency toward hopelessness. Sam sees sun above the shadows; Frodo never really had any hope they'd make to Mordor. This tendency toward giving up may be fundamental to his eventual inability to reassimilate into Middle-earth and his need to go West to heal (or metaphorically die). Yet this tendency is not strong enough to stop him from making an ostensibly impossible journey to save Middle-earth. Frodo arguably also tends to hold on to hurts and fears. He is frightened of Farmer Maggot and his dogs for thirty years based on one boyhood incident. It is possible that the recurring pain of his injuries at the hands of the Lord of the Nazgul and Shelob is intensified by this trait. Finally, he is sometimes condescending and entitled toward Sam—but I suspect Tolkien did not mean this as a flaw and that I am simply eying this behavior through a socially egalitarian lens. That's about all I can say against Frodo.
His psyche is extremely steady. I attribute this to his having strong emotional supports in his formative years but also to having a naturally even-keeled personality. Frodo's pre-war life is not always easy. His life path turns on the trauma of abruptly losing both his parents in a boating accident when he's twelve. Thereafter, he is taken in by his mother's relatives at Brandy Hall for nine years before being adopted by Bilbo at twenty-one. And then, at thirty-three, which is just barely of age, he loses Bilbo, who, as far as he knows, he may never see again. Add to these losses that he is an only child, which is rare in the Shire, with no close kin near his age except Lotho Sackville-Baggins, who is not a friend. And further add that he is something of an outsider in both Buckland, where he is a Baggins (a West Farthing family), and Hobbiton, where he is, as Lobelia asserts, a "Brandybuck!" (an East Farthing family)—and/or simply labeled "queer" and "cracking," like Bilbo. This is certainly enough to make a lot of people feel lonely and isolated and doubt whether they are actually cared for or wanted.
Frodo exhibits none of these insecurities. No doubt, this is largely because he is very consistently loved. By the absence of any hints to contrary, we can assume his parents care for him well. His family at Brandy Hall is clearly good to him. This period is the genesis of his close friendship with Merry. (In fact, Merry is born while Frodo is living with the family in Brandy Hall.) Bilbo adores him. He is the son Bilbo never had and, in some ways, the life partner too. They are very much on the same wavelength and have such a warm and loving relationship that even Bilbo's assertion that he has to go off alone on a holiday forever, though saddening, does not shake Frodo's faith in Bilbo's abiding love for him. Yet it also speaks not only to "nurture" but to the evenness of Frodo's fundamental personality that the misfortunes and peculiarities of his life never seem to deeply throw him. If anything, his strangeness has given him a kind of cosmopolitan free thinking. He is at home in West Farthing or the East, with at a crowded party or walking alone in the forest, chatting pleasantly with his friends or being berated by Lobelia—he handles it all in stride.
Grounded in this fundamental security, this confidence that he is worthy and loved and knows right from wrong, Frodo addresses the world with an unassuming good will, completely without ulterior psychological motive. He is polite, mature, amicable, reasonable, courageous (which does not mean without fear). He is a good judge of people and has sound priorities and good tools for moral decision making. He is, in a word, exactly the sort of person you would want to carry the Ring because he has such a very low level of psychological insecurity for it to take hold of. To put it another way, you can't prey on someone's insecurities if those insecurities are, by and large, not there.
Yet he falls to the Ring. In the end, he cannot let it go. This is bad. Indeed, as the Ring gets ahold of him, it elicits various bad behaviors. From the foolishness of putting it on when he shouldn't to wanting to strike Bilbo for coveting it (though not doing so), he escalates to ugly, domineering talk at Gollum and sheer nastiness at Sam in the Tower of Cirith Ungol when Sam has done nothing to merit it. And it is worth noting that at the Cracks of Doom, not only is Frodo unwilling to part with the Ring; he is apparently willing to fight Gollum to the death for it. He is, for a brief space, literally murderous. How can a very good person fall into such utterly foul behavior?
Well, it's the Ring, yes? It corrupts. It's like original sin. Any ordinary, imperfect, non-Tom Bombadil person will succumb to it because they're not perfect. Fair enough. But what does that mean for our real world where evil, cursed Rings don't actually exist?
Now the Ring, as the Professor would observe, is not an allegory for anything. But it is applicable to a lot of things, and I want to apply it now to psychological trauma. By trauma, I mean a singular or sustained/repeated experience of psychological distress so intense that it creates damage in the psyche, for example, patterns of fear, anger, distrust that tend to manifest in dysfunctional thought processes and behaviors. The Ring brings out thoughts and behavior indicative of trauma: nastiness, covetousness, addictive patterns, obsession, a desire for domination, and so on. And it brings these things out, as trauma does, when we are pushed past our capacity to control them.
Frodo at Mount Doom is pushed beyond his capacity. In fact, he's been pushed beyond his reasonable, sustainable capacity for a long time. We see the signs of this not only in his overtly bad behaviors but in the increasingly crushing weight of the Ring, the Eye growing into a constant presence in his mind, and his nearing complete physical collapse. The task requires him to give more than he possesses. And any person required to do more than they can do will fail.
The Ring as a trigger for trauma is a metaphor. For some characters, it may have a referent that's easy to grasp: Boromir wants it because he wants the power to save Gondor. But for Frodo, it's not so clear in literal terms why it should corrupt him: he doesn't really crave power, which is fundamentally what it pretends to offer.
But it doesn't really matter what the cause of a trauma is. In some cases, it's obvious, and most human beings will respond in similar ways. It might be World War I or the Vietnam War or growing up in an abusive household or being asked to carry an evil Ring into war zone. In other cases, the traumatic circumstances may not be so obvious. People are different, and life affects us in different ways. The catastrophe might be living in the shadow of the more popular sibling or having neurodivergent processing when no one understands why you need the pen in the same place every day. It might be the pet who died or the friend who moved, the boyfriend who said, to borrow from Tori Amos, "you're really an ugly girl." In many cases, it is not simply one thing but an accumulation of wounds throughout a life that begins, after a while, to reach a critical mass.
There are not better or worse reasons to be traumatized. It does not matter if someone else's trauma makes sense to us. If it acts on their psyche as trauma, it is trauma. It is serious. And if a person grappling with trauma is pushed past their capacity, even the best person is capable of tremendous wrong. Whether a person does great or little harm, once or fairly continuously, the innate goodness of the person is, I think, less relevant than the degree to which they are pushed past their capacity.
That is the best way I have yet found to understand the question of my own goodness or badness. I don't know how bad my badness is. I will never know. I can't talk to the person I harmed or anyone close to her, ever, and they are the only people who know the impact of my actions. Other sources have given other responses, ranging from "unforgivable" to "so you made a mistake" (shrug). In fact, there is no single, stable answer to that question. Even the impact is not necessarily identical to the moral culpability.
But what I do know is myself. I know my life, my history, my psyche. I know the sources of my trauma and their cross-pollinations. I understand pretty well why I did what I did. At least, I understand it in more detail than anyone else ever will. I know exactly how far past my capacity I was pushed. Pretty far, in fact. It might not look like it should be that way from the outside, but that's the way it is.
My therapist articulated my problem as seeking external validation to substitute for my own lack self-worth. I knew that was a problem, but I thank her for centering it as the problem. The fact is external input can never tell me how good or bad I am. In fact, I am coming to believe that how "good" or "bad" someone is is almost a worthless question. (Yes, even for Trump, even for Hitler.) The more important question is why someone does what they do. I know why I did it. Knowing that cannot repair it. But it can be my groundwork for beginning to heal from my trauma and, thus, run less risk of being stretched beyond my capacity to consistently do good.
With Issues in mind, I want to talk about Frodo and the Ring and the nature of evil. This train of thought arises out of discussion with my therapist over my need to develop a more stable sense of self-identity, particularly surrounding my assessment of how good or bad a person I am. So let me lay that all over Frodo… (LotR spoilers follow, if you care.)
Frodo is a good person. In fact, he is one of most well-written thoroughly good protagonists I've ever encountered. He is not quite what I call a literary "saint," in non-religiously specific terms. To me, a "saint" is called strongly to the service of others. Frodo certainly answers this call in the war, but he answers it under extreme circumstances and prompted in part by desire to postpone being parted from the Ring. In this, he is not quite a Vash the Stampede or Alyosha Karamazov or Kagetora by the end of Mirage. All things being equal, he would rather live a quiet life, or perhaps have a small adventure, while having good relationships with the people around him and otherwise not affecting things much: a quiet, ordinary person.
Yet in his quiet ordinariness, he is extraordinary. Gandalf thinks he's the best hobbit in the Shire, and he doesn't think that for nothing. Frodo's goodness is unobtrusive, but his relative lack of personal failings is remarkable. Discounting the malign influence of the Ring, I can only think of a few. Tolkien, I think, meant the most notable to be a tendency toward hopelessness. Sam sees sun above the shadows; Frodo never really had any hope they'd make to Mordor. This tendency toward giving up may be fundamental to his eventual inability to reassimilate into Middle-earth and his need to go West to heal (or metaphorically die). Yet this tendency is not strong enough to stop him from making an ostensibly impossible journey to save Middle-earth. Frodo arguably also tends to hold on to hurts and fears. He is frightened of Farmer Maggot and his dogs for thirty years based on one boyhood incident. It is possible that the recurring pain of his injuries at the hands of the Lord of the Nazgul and Shelob is intensified by this trait. Finally, he is sometimes condescending and entitled toward Sam—but I suspect Tolkien did not mean this as a flaw and that I am simply eying this behavior through a socially egalitarian lens. That's about all I can say against Frodo.
His psyche is extremely steady. I attribute this to his having strong emotional supports in his formative years but also to having a naturally even-keeled personality. Frodo's pre-war life is not always easy. His life path turns on the trauma of abruptly losing both his parents in a boating accident when he's twelve. Thereafter, he is taken in by his mother's relatives at Brandy Hall for nine years before being adopted by Bilbo at twenty-one. And then, at thirty-three, which is just barely of age, he loses Bilbo, who, as far as he knows, he may never see again. Add to these losses that he is an only child, which is rare in the Shire, with no close kin near his age except Lotho Sackville-Baggins, who is not a friend. And further add that he is something of an outsider in both Buckland, where he is a Baggins (a West Farthing family), and Hobbiton, where he is, as Lobelia asserts, a "Brandybuck!" (an East Farthing family)—and/or simply labeled "queer" and "cracking," like Bilbo. This is certainly enough to make a lot of people feel lonely and isolated and doubt whether they are actually cared for or wanted.
Frodo exhibits none of these insecurities. No doubt, this is largely because he is very consistently loved. By the absence of any hints to contrary, we can assume his parents care for him well. His family at Brandy Hall is clearly good to him. This period is the genesis of his close friendship with Merry. (In fact, Merry is born while Frodo is living with the family in Brandy Hall.) Bilbo adores him. He is the son Bilbo never had and, in some ways, the life partner too. They are very much on the same wavelength and have such a warm and loving relationship that even Bilbo's assertion that he has to go off alone on a holiday forever, though saddening, does not shake Frodo's faith in Bilbo's abiding love for him. Yet it also speaks not only to "nurture" but to the evenness of Frodo's fundamental personality that the misfortunes and peculiarities of his life never seem to deeply throw him. If anything, his strangeness has given him a kind of cosmopolitan free thinking. He is at home in West Farthing or the East, with at a crowded party or walking alone in the forest, chatting pleasantly with his friends or being berated by Lobelia—he handles it all in stride.
Grounded in this fundamental security, this confidence that he is worthy and loved and knows right from wrong, Frodo addresses the world with an unassuming good will, completely without ulterior psychological motive. He is polite, mature, amicable, reasonable, courageous (which does not mean without fear). He is a good judge of people and has sound priorities and good tools for moral decision making. He is, in a word, exactly the sort of person you would want to carry the Ring because he has such a very low level of psychological insecurity for it to take hold of. To put it another way, you can't prey on someone's insecurities if those insecurities are, by and large, not there.
Yet he falls to the Ring. In the end, he cannot let it go. This is bad. Indeed, as the Ring gets ahold of him, it elicits various bad behaviors. From the foolishness of putting it on when he shouldn't to wanting to strike Bilbo for coveting it (though not doing so), he escalates to ugly, domineering talk at Gollum and sheer nastiness at Sam in the Tower of Cirith Ungol when Sam has done nothing to merit it. And it is worth noting that at the Cracks of Doom, not only is Frodo unwilling to part with the Ring; he is apparently willing to fight Gollum to the death for it. He is, for a brief space, literally murderous. How can a very good person fall into such utterly foul behavior?
Well, it's the Ring, yes? It corrupts. It's like original sin. Any ordinary, imperfect, non-Tom Bombadil person will succumb to it because they're not perfect. Fair enough. But what does that mean for our real world where evil, cursed Rings don't actually exist?
Now the Ring, as the Professor would observe, is not an allegory for anything. But it is applicable to a lot of things, and I want to apply it now to psychological trauma. By trauma, I mean a singular or sustained/repeated experience of psychological distress so intense that it creates damage in the psyche, for example, patterns of fear, anger, distrust that tend to manifest in dysfunctional thought processes and behaviors. The Ring brings out thoughts and behavior indicative of trauma: nastiness, covetousness, addictive patterns, obsession, a desire for domination, and so on. And it brings these things out, as trauma does, when we are pushed past our capacity to control them.
Frodo at Mount Doom is pushed beyond his capacity. In fact, he's been pushed beyond his reasonable, sustainable capacity for a long time. We see the signs of this not only in his overtly bad behaviors but in the increasingly crushing weight of the Ring, the Eye growing into a constant presence in his mind, and his nearing complete physical collapse. The task requires him to give more than he possesses. And any person required to do more than they can do will fail.
The Ring as a trigger for trauma is a metaphor. For some characters, it may have a referent that's easy to grasp: Boromir wants it because he wants the power to save Gondor. But for Frodo, it's not so clear in literal terms why it should corrupt him: he doesn't really crave power, which is fundamentally what it pretends to offer.
But it doesn't really matter what the cause of a trauma is. In some cases, it's obvious, and most human beings will respond in similar ways. It might be World War I or the Vietnam War or growing up in an abusive household or being asked to carry an evil Ring into war zone. In other cases, the traumatic circumstances may not be so obvious. People are different, and life affects us in different ways. The catastrophe might be living in the shadow of the more popular sibling or having neurodivergent processing when no one understands why you need the pen in the same place every day. It might be the pet who died or the friend who moved, the boyfriend who said, to borrow from Tori Amos, "you're really an ugly girl." In many cases, it is not simply one thing but an accumulation of wounds throughout a life that begins, after a while, to reach a critical mass.
There are not better or worse reasons to be traumatized. It does not matter if someone else's trauma makes sense to us. If it acts on their psyche as trauma, it is trauma. It is serious. And if a person grappling with trauma is pushed past their capacity, even the best person is capable of tremendous wrong. Whether a person does great or little harm, once or fairly continuously, the innate goodness of the person is, I think, less relevant than the degree to which they are pushed past their capacity.
That is the best way I have yet found to understand the question of my own goodness or badness. I don't know how bad my badness is. I will never know. I can't talk to the person I harmed or anyone close to her, ever, and they are the only people who know the impact of my actions. Other sources have given other responses, ranging from "unforgivable" to "so you made a mistake" (shrug). In fact, there is no single, stable answer to that question. Even the impact is not necessarily identical to the moral culpability.
But what I do know is myself. I know my life, my history, my psyche. I know the sources of my trauma and their cross-pollinations. I understand pretty well why I did what I did. At least, I understand it in more detail than anyone else ever will. I know exactly how far past my capacity I was pushed. Pretty far, in fact. It might not look like it should be that way from the outside, but that's the way it is.
My therapist articulated my problem as seeking external validation to substitute for my own lack self-worth. I knew that was a problem, but I thank her for centering it as the problem. The fact is external input can never tell me how good or bad I am. In fact, I am coming to believe that how "good" or "bad" someone is is almost a worthless question. (Yes, even for Trump, even for Hitler.) The more important question is why someone does what they do. I know why I did it. Knowing that cannot repair it. But it can be my groundwork for beginning to heal from my trauma and, thus, run less risk of being stretched beyond my capacity to consistently do good.