Quote:
Originally Posted by Mithadan
This is really perceptive. Frodo began by seeking to save the Shire and lure the Ringwraiths away from his home. He then volunteered and set out to save not just the Shire but all of Middle Earth. He does not turn back even when Sam glimpses evil happening in the Shire in Galadriel's mirror, they do not turn back. When they return to the Shire, they find that they failed to do what they set out to do.
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I think, and quite a few scholars have commented as well, that the return to the Shire by Frodo and friends mirrored many of the veterans returning to Britain after WWI. They left to fight the Hun and for a way of life, but there was a great deal of disillusionment upon their return. It was as if not only they had changed but England, too, was no longer recognizable.
Of course, they left as boys and returned as men, but it was more than that. Some, like the brilliant poet Wilfred Owen, did not escape the abject horror of the war, but rather sought his inevitable doom and willfully died on the front lines rather than going home (there is a story that Owen's friend and fellow writer Siegfried Sassoon, also wounded in the war, threatened to stab Owen in the leg if he tried to return to the front line - Owen secretly returned in spite of the threat). Sassoon and German writer Erich Maria Remarque would eloquently recall the destruction of the body, mind and soul of surviving soldiers.
Tolkien, too, would reflect on this stranger in a strange land effect, and the premise that you can never really go home again. He lost many dear friends, and Britain itself had drastically changed, the agrarian society of his youth was making way for Orkish engines and great brick chimneys belching black smoke above Bywater, and Frodo himself, pale and full of melancholy, could best be described as a shell-shocked soldier unable to cope with the cottages mowed under, replaced by God-awful factories and ugly new houses.