Frodo Decides—Or Does He?

C.S. Lewis in Williams and the Arthuriad comments that the first thing we ought to demand of a great poem is “something that can be called Wisdom. We wish, after reading it, to understand things in general, or at least some things, better than we did before.” This is true for novels or plays as well as for poetry, and gives a reason why Christians should read imaginative literature. Of course, we should also read for the pleasure of the story.

Among the most popular and consistently best-selling books of the last two decades is a trilogy that answers the demand for both pleasure and wisdom. J. R. R. Tolkien filled The Lord of the Rings with intriguing characters, exciting events, and compelling themes. He set the story in Middle-earth, similar and yet foreign to our world, rather like a very ancient Britain. Wizards, dwarfs, elves, hobbits, and ents, or tree people, populate the country as well as men, and together they must fight to overthrow the Dark Lord, Sauron, who seeks to rule Middle-earth.

Elves and dwarfs and wizards are familiar to us all. But hobbits need some explanation, which Tolkien lovingly provides. They are small, quiet-loving, agrarian creatures, with curly brown hair on both head and feet. They don’t need shoes, because the soles of their feet are leather-like. They love food and drink and convivality. They like to smoke pipes. And they hate adventures. But in the story four hobbits—Frodo Baggins, Sam Gamgee, Peregrin Took (Pippin), and Meriadoc Brandybuck (Merry)—set out on a quest to defeat the Dark Lord.

Frodo bears the ring, the power of the Dark Lord, which he must throw into the Cracks of Doom to destroy the ring and thereby Sauron’s power. The ring makes its wearer invisible, but the more often a person uses it, the more control over the person the ring exerts. Eventually the ring rules the person, and he becomes permanently invisible, a shadow, like the Ringwraiths, the nine servants of the Dark Lord. For their task the hobbits have the help of Gandalf the Wizard, Aragorn, heir to the throne of Middle-earth, and the rulers of both elves and dwarfs. To balance the Ringwraiths, the nine servants of Sauron, nine beings make up the quest company that hopes to destroy the ring.

Such a skeletal outline gives only a hint of the rich texture of the plot, but it does provide a basis for discussing one of the most compelling themes of the story, that of free will and Providence. Much of the wisdom in The Lord of the Rings comes from Tolkien’s handling of this theme. Middle-earth is a much narrower and more linear world than our universe. But the author gives us a wonderful picture of an omniscient Creator. He brings into perspective the relation between our will and God’s. We in this century have so stressed individual freedom that we have forgotten the providence of God—or at least have only given intellectual assent to that doctrine. Reading The Lord of the Rings brings a feeling of freshness to the fact of God’s rule. And in discouraging days it can remind us who controls history.

Tolkien carefully constructs a world where the tension between free will and Providence is a central issue. The word “choice” recurs—throughout the trilogy. Although each character must make decisions, often with limited knowledge and time, certain characters feel the weight of decision-making more heavily than do others—Frodo and Aragorn, for example. Gandalf tells Frodo that he must take the ring. Frodo exclaims:

“I wish it need not have happened in my time!” “So do I,” Gandalf answers, “and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.” [Houghton Mifflin, 1965, I, 60; all subsequent quotations are also from this edition].

That reminds us of Paul’s warning to the Ephesians that they should, as the King James puts it, “redeem the time, because the days are evil.” Providence rules the times; we do not. But we are responsible for our response to the times.

During the quest, Frodo (like us) has guides to encourage him and to advise him how to respond. Gandalf is only one of these. Chance meetings—and Tolkien constantly questions the idea of chance—help Frodo fulfill the task to which he’s been called.

The characters often have difficulty determining which choices are right. Every reader can empathize with them. For example, when the four hobbits decide to leave the path in the forest, “at first their choice seemed to be good.” Then Old Man Willow—trees are alive in Middle-earth—captures Merry and Pippin, and the decision seems ill-fated. But the Willow episode brings Tom Bombadil, the oldest creature in Middle-earth, who helps them through the forest.

Throughout the story Frodo finds it hard to choose his path; sometimes each way seems bad. His companions feel the same anguish: “Why cannot we decide, and so help Frodo?” asks Legolas the elf. Not until the end of the trilogy do any of the characters fully realize the good or ill of their choices. In real life we may never know that with certainty. Gimli the dwarf astutely says, “Maybe there is no right choice.”

In balancing the relation between our wills and God’s, Tolkien shows that sacrifice is an inescapable part of choice. Denethor, Steward of Gondor, tries to kill both his son and himself. He unlawfully wants to deny his son the choice of returning the scepter to the king, Aragorn. (The stewards held “rod and rule in the name of the King, until he shall return.”) But Denethor admits he does not have the “authority … to order the hour of death.” Gandalf asks him, “What then would you have if your will could have its way?” But no one really is allowed to have his or her total will. One must give up one thing to gain another. Even Arwen Evenstar, the daughter of Elron elflord, who chooses mortality and life with Aragorn the King, does not have her complete will. In choosing Aragorn she loses her father. Denethor answers Gandalf:

“I would have things as they were in all the days of my life, and in the days of my longfathers before me.… But if doom denies this to me, then I will have naught: neither life diminished, nor love halved, nor honour abated [III, 130],

In refusing to bow to God’s will Denethor nearly ruins the quest.

Tolkien gives us a vivid portrait of Romans seven. When Frodo puts on the ring, he thinks he is in control. Only later does he understand whose will he obeyed. Like each of us, Frodo must discover whose will he obeys, either consciously or unconsciously. After putting on the ring Frodo at one point cries out: “Never, Never! or was it: Verily I come, I come to you? He could not tell—For a moment, perfectly balanced between their piercing points, he writhed, tormented.” The hobbit wants to resist the ring while he longs to yield to it. In yielding to temptation he acts what he does not will; in this Tolkien captures the struggle of every Christian. Later when Frodo and Sam are in the heart of Mordor, the Dark Lord’s country, Frodo gets the strength to resist from outside himself. “Aiya Earendil Elenim Ancalimal! he cried, and knew not what he had spoken; for it seemed that another voice spoke through his, clear, untroubled by the foul air of the pit.”

We, like the people of Middle-earth have a duty to discern good and evil. And once we’ve determined that, we must fulfill the tasks given to us. In a sense, we choose to be chosen. As the elflord Elrond tells Frodo: “I think that this task is appointed for you.… I do not lay it on you. But if you take it freely, I will say that your choice is right.” God chooses us, but he leaves it to us to accept or reject that choice.

Often we interfere with God’s plans because we misunderstand our roles. Aragorn hesitates to choose because he fails to see where his will fits into the plans of Providence. He says that “the fate of the Bearer [Frodo] is in my hands no longer.” But Frodo is in the hands of Providence hands and always was. To some extent Frodo recognizes that his role is to go to the Cracks of Doom, though he, too, wonders at times who directs his course. At some point all the characters ask with Frodo, “Is it the will of the Dark Tower that steers us? All my choices have proved ill.” Where hobbit or human admits that will has failed, that free choice is inoperative, then, paradoxically, the will is strongest. We must admit our weaknesses to God to get his help. Frodo on two occasions resists the ring when he thinks he cannot. When the Ringwraiths command him to halt, “he had no longer the strength to refuse”; yet he does. In Mordor, the Dark Lord’s country, he thinks himself powerless to disobey:

There was no longer any answer to that command in his own will, dismayed by terror though it was, and he felt only the beating upon him of a great power from outside. It took his hand, and as Frodo watched with his mind, not willing it but in suspense … it moved the hand inch by inch towards the chain upon his neck. Then his own will stirred [II, 316].

Yet even here he might have failed without the phial of Galadriel, the elf, her gift to Sam. The phial of light in some ways symbolizes the light provided by the Holy Spirit. Sam, too, experiences this same release and accompanying victory.

When the thought of free will is most tenacious the characters are the least free.—Bilbo, Frodo’s uncle, is controlled by the ring when he tells Gandalf, “I’ll do as I choose and go as I please.” Even after he relinquishes it, the fate of the ring governs his life, as it does the life of all those in Middle-earth.

As Saruman, the wizard who forsakes good for evil, tries to dismiss Gandalf and company from his fortress, and starts to walk away from them, Gandalf commands him to return. Against his will Saruman turns to face the other wizard. In arrogantly presuming freedom, Saruman—like Frodo near the end of the story—finds himself more enslaved. Frodo’s greatest arrogance comes when he chooses to possess the ring. He comes to the Cracks of Doom: “But I do not choose now to do what I came to do. I will not do this deed. The Ring is mine!” In that climactic passage of will and choice, we see the futility of trusting in free will. Here we watch Providence at work. The quest is accomplished regardless of Frodo’s choice.

The struggle to understand Providence is fundamental in the trilogy. “How on earth did it [the ring] come to me?” asks Frodo. And each character in his own way asks that. Gandalf tells Frodo:

Behind that there was something else at work, beyond any design of the Ring-maker. I can put it no plainer than by saying that Bilbo was meant to find the Ring, and not by its maker. In which case you also were meant to have it. And that may be an encouraging thought [I, 65].

Events are purposefully predetermined. The elf Gildor tells the hobbits on one occasion that “in this meeting there may be more than chance; but the purpose is not clear to me.” Decisions and situations that seem wrong work out well. For example, the company was warned against Fangorn Forest, the most ancient forest in Middle-earth, but without Merry and Pippin’s visit in the forest with Treebeard, the oldest tree shepherd, Saruman might not have been overthrown. Gandalf was delayed in getting to the Shire, the home of the hobbits, which “nearly proved our ruin. And yet I’m not sure: it may have been better so.”

The narrator makes it clear that the travelers are following rather than directing their path, as in the Old Forest: “the path that had brought them”; “they were being headed off, and were simply following a course chosen for them”; “found themselves following.” Tom Bombadil’s timely appearance reinforces the narrator’s word choice: “Just chance brought me then, if chance you call it. It was no plan of mine, though I was waiting for you.” Chance is only a convenient word for that of which the hobbits have no previous knowledge. Elves, wizards, and men all recognize that the One or God is acting to preserve Middle-earth. Even accidents are questioned.

Elrond’s speech during the council when they decide to send the ring to the Cracks of Doom is perhaps the most familiar passage dealing with the One who calls and rules:

That is the purpose for which you are called hither. Called, I say, though I have not called you to me, strangers from distantlands. You have come and are here met, in this very nick of time, by chance as it may seem. Yet it is not so. Believe rather that it is so ordered that we, who sit here, and none others, must now find counsel for the peril of the world [I, 255].

Elrond brings in the element of faith in convincing the council that each one has been called in some personal, private way. The call of each is renewed repeatedly.

Galadriel and Gandalf echo what Elrond tells the council. These three keepers of the elf-rings all make strong cases that events have been ordered by someone outside Middle-earth. Gandalf’s words, “a strange chance, if chance it was,” become a kind of haunting refrain. Galadriel, too, understands that what seems like chance is really the outside ordering of events. She speaks of her part in terms of faith: “For not in doing or contriving, not in choosing between this course and another can I avail; but only in knowing what was and is, and in part also what shall be.” Her part is to be faithful to what has been revealed to her. The One provides knowledge of certain events through dreams, visions, and prophecies. Frodo in a dream sees Gandalf resurrected and has premonitions of danger in Mordor; Gandalf senses danger through “forebodings” and knows that “the tide has turned”; Aragorn prophesies that Gandalf will fall if he enters the Mines of Moria, Boromire dreams that he should seek for the sword that was broken; Faramir learns of his brother’s death through a vision. The sons of Elrond tell Aragorn to “remember the words of the seer, and the Paths of the Dead.”

Galadriel relies on prophecy; whether solely through her mirror, in which one can see both past and future, or through some sort of direct revelation we are not told. Both her mirror and the palantiri, the stones of vision, are instruments of the One. Before the company leaves her country Galadriel comforts each one: “Do not trouble your hearts overmuch with the thought of the road tonight. Maybe the paths that you each shall tread are already laid before your feet, though you do not see them.” Similarly, Christ tells us not to be anxious, since God controls the universe. As with our lives, chance events become pivotal. Pippin against his will looks into one of the palantiri. Gandalf realizes that “at this time we have been strangely fortunate. Maybe, I have been saved by this hobbit from a grave blunder.” That is the recurring pattern in the trilogy.

In Tolkien’s heavy use of vision, prophecy, call, order, and plan we find a full, rich interpretation of God’s promise to those who are called according to his purpose. God’s plans, just as those of the One, ultimately do not fail. Although Tolkien has not described the world in which the biblical history of fall and redemption took place, he creates a parallel universe in which similar principles rule. He gives us a world that is graciously ordered by a beneficient Creator. The One intervenes in the events of Middle-earth. Tolkien provides an atmosphere in which what he calls the “evangelium” can be introduced, and certainly there are echoes of it in the story. But he has done this implicitly rather than explicitly. He thought that “myth is at its best when it is presented by a poet who feels rather than makes explicit what his theme portends; who presents it incarnate in the world of history and geography.” Tolkien makes us feel the force of Providence, the love and concern of God active in human events. He presents his incarnate in the history and geography of Middle-earth.

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