Quote:
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Originally Posted by Luthien
I don't mean the plan you, yourself, choose for your life...but the one for which you were born, the one that someone greater (God) planned for you. The satisification and sense of completion that comes from this connection is reward.
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But God/Eru is not 'present' for Frodo. He knows nothing about anything 'beyond the circles of the World'. It seems that Frodo is constantly 'backed into a corner' & the choices he makes are between going ahead with the Quest or just giving up & losing everything. He has no concept of 'Heaven' or that he is 'serving Eru'. In a real sense his case is worse than that of Job - Job at least knew of & had faith in God (petty & tetchy as the God of the book of Job may be).
What I'm saying is that any sense of 'satisfaction' & 'completion' is absent from Frodo's experience during his life in Middle-earth. Eru may as well not exist at all - if Middle-earth was an entirely 'pagan' world, or a world which came into being 'randomly' Frodo would be in the same psychological position. He does nothing for Eru - he acts only for others around him. Even when he goes to the Havens he doesn't see it as a 'stage' in a journey towards 'Heaven' or in his service to God. The end of Frodo's journey (in his own mind) is death. Tolkien suggested in one of his letters that the journey into the West may be read as an allegory (yes, he uses
that word) of death.
As somene recently suggested to me, Frodo is like one of the young men of Tolkien's generation who went to fight in WW1. Most of them went not because they felt they were living out God's plan for them, but because they felt obligated to 'do their bit' for their country, their family & ther friends. Many of them lost their lives, their health, their hope, but they felt they had 'done the right thing'. Like Frodo, they had given up the things they loved & cared for, not for God, or for a heavenly reward, but simply 'so that others could keep them'.