[The Squatter of Amon Rûdh]

Letter #246 is a very detailed exploration of Frodo's state of mind during the years before his departure. It is from this series of drafts that the following consideration is taken.

'Alas! there are some wounds that cannot be wholly cured', said Gandalf (III 268) - not in Middle-earth. Frodo was sent or allowed to pass over the Sea to heal him - if that could be done, before he died. He would have eventually to 'pass away': no mortal could, or can, abide forever on earth, or within Time. So he went both to a purgatory and to a reward, for a while: a period of reflection and peace and a gaining of a truer understanding of his position in littleness and in greatness, spent still in Time amid the natural beauty of 'Arda unmarred', the Earth unspoiled by evil

I think it interesting that Tolkien chooses to use the religiously weighted term 'purgatory' - a period (also a place) of cleansing and preparation for something beyond. It is as though it is necessary for Frodo to be purged, as much as possible, of the Ring's influence if he is to die in peace. Unlike the popular conception of the Christian Purgatory, however, Frodo's journey to the West is also a reward. He has in a sense become too rarified, and his various emotional and psychological wounds, exacerbated by self-reproach for his imagined failure at the Sammath Naur, are too deep for him entirely to belong or to achieve recovery in Arda marred. Tolkien himself is unambiguous, both in The Lord of the Rings itself and in his correspondance:

...I think it can be observed in history and experience that some individuals seem to be placed in 'sacrificial' positions: situations or tasks that for perfection of solution demand powers beyond their utmost limits, even beyond all possible limits for an incarnate creature in a physical world - in which a body may be destroyed, or so maimed that it affects the mind and will...
Frodo undertook his quest out of love - to save the world he knew from disaster at his own expense, if he could; and also in complete humility, acknowledging that he was wholly inadequate to the task. His real contract was only to do what he could, to try to find a way, and to go as far on the road as his strength of mind and body allowed. He did that. I do not myself see that the breaking of his mind and will under demonic pressure after torment was any more a moral failure than the breaking of his body would have been - say by being strangled by Gollum or crushed by a falling rock.

It seems clear to me that this is the opinion of Arwen, Gandalf and others when they conspire to put Frodo on a ship to Tol Eressëa.

It is this sense that Frodo has been called upon to attempt the impossible, and although he has succeeded beyond his wildest hopes, he is still broken both physically and mentally; and this is compounded by self-reproach for what he sees as a three-fold failure: to reject the Ring at the final crisis; to lead Gollum to redemption and wholly to protect the Shire. Like Gawain at the end of his adventures with the Green Knight, Frodo regards his relatively minor failings with disproportionate shame, and like Gawain he is more than absolved by those who entrusted him with his charge, as his journey into the West makes explicit.

[ 9:18 AM December 01, 2003: Message edited by: The Squatter of Amon Rûdh ]