[Leaf]

Originally Posted by Mithadan

[...]Was there any circumstance under which Frodo might have completed the quest voluntarily and destroyed the Ring? Could he have been coerced or assisted?

As I stated in the doom of the ring - thread, I don't believe any person would have been able to destroy the ring willingly, or by choice. Note that Frodo wasn't even able to throw the ring into his fireplace back home. And Gandalf about knew this: "He weighed the Ring in his hand, hesitating, and forcing himself to remember all that Gandalf had told him; and then with an effort of will he made a movement, as if to cast it away - but he found that he had put it back in his pocket. Gandalf laughed grimly. 'You see? Already you too, Frodo, cannot easily let it go, nor will to damage it. And I could not "make" you – except by force, which would break your mind.'"

So, I retain my previous stand on this matter:

Originally Posted by myself, how snooty

As I see it, the person who destroys the ring willingly, at the cracks of Mt. Doom, would have to be a person who rejects the very possibility of any kind of influence to the world around him, a person without any interest in his own fate and in the fate of others. The problem is that this 'being' would be, essentialy, an 'un-person'.

Originally Posted by Kuruharan

On the other hand, given his experience with successfully persuading Bilbo to give up the Ring that perhaps Gandalf could have persuaded Frodo to destroy it...on the assumption that Gandalf intended intended to accompany Frodo to the end (which I think he did).

It's true, Bilbo parted with the ring willingly, but Gandalf took the implications of this event with a major grain of salt: "A Ring of Power looks after itself, Frodo. It may slip off treacherously, but its keeper never abandons it. At most he plays with the idea of handing it on to someone else's care - and that only at an early stage, when it first begins to grip. But as far as I know Bilbo alone in history has ever gone beyond playing, and really done it. He needed all my help, too. And even so he would never have just forsaken it, or cast it aside. It was not Gollum, Frodo, but the Ring itself that decided things."

On a side note: Gandalf seems to forget about Cirdan and his own Ring of Power.

Originally Posted by Zigûr

I agree. I think faith was a major component of Gandalf's plan: he believed that good would succeed in the end, and was primarily interested in arranging the circumstances for it to do so.

Faithfulness, as opposed to a need for certainty, seems to be a general distinction in characterisation between Gandalf and Saruman, and the reason the latter failed his mission - trying to force results by his own power, and that power which he could take, rather than accepting the role of a higher power in events. It goes back to Gandalf's remark about Bilbo and Frodo being "meant" to have the Ring, "and not by its maker."

I think that this is the most helpful perspective on Gandalf's planning and way of thinking.