To make a confession, this thread was not just inspired by my prior post in the Doom of the Ring thread (which is a real expression of my curiosity) but also by something that I stumbled upon while looking for something else. Letters By Tolkien has an abysmally deficient index. If you are looking for a specific subject regarding Frodo, for example, you are limited to looking for references for Frodo; there are no more detailed "key words." In this case, I was looking for a reference that I seemed to recall about Frodo being "chosen" for the Quest. I never found it (actually stopped looking) and instead came upon this regarding Frodo:
Quote:
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"'Sacrificial' situations, I should call them: sc. positions in which the 'good' of the world depends on the behavior of an individual in circumstances which demand of him suffering and endurance far beyond the normal - even, it may happen (or seem, humanly speaking), demand a strength of body and mind which he does not possess; he is in a sense DOOMED TO FAILURE, doomed to fall to temptation or be broken by pressure against his 'will'...
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Letter No. 181, emphasis added.
Tolkien refers to Frodo's position at the end, noting that even in Bag End he had been unwilling to harm the Ring, as "an apparently complete trap: a person of greater native power could probably never have resisted the Ring's lure to power so long; a person of less power could not hope to resist it in the final decision."
Regarding the Fellowship, he says that the quest "was bound to fail as a piece of the world-plan, and was also bound to end in disaster..."
So the final scene at Sammath Naur was, to Tolkien, "mechanically, morally, and psychologically credible".
I agree with others above that Gandalf had no idea what might happen at the end of the day, should the Fellowship or some fragment of it reach the Cracks of Doom. Surely he knew that Frodo could not destroy the Ring on his own. Surely he knew that Sam would not be able to act against his own Master. Some outside force was needed to accomplish the impossible; the destruction of the Ring. Here, Gollum was that force. If Gandalf, Aragorn, Boromir, Legolas or Gimli, the "heroes" had been there, could any of them have achieved what Gollum, by accident, curse or fate, accomplished? Tolkien's answer appears to be no.