LotR -- Book 1 - Chapter 12 - Flight to the Ford

[davem]

I wouldn't deny Child's points regarding Frodo, but I think we have to take Milos' points on board regarding Frodo's mental state, because I think they're valid. How much hope does Frodo actually have, & how much is he simply grasping at straws? To what extent is his decision to go based more on faith than on hope?

Clearly he doesn't see himself as naturally 'fortunate', a lucky soul. throughout he's taken chances on circumstances & on others around him, & he doesn't feel that he has been lucky in those chances. If Tolkien is correct in saying that at the end Frodo feels like a broken failure that must affect his expectations of the outcome of his journey West. In the end it will come down to how we read Frodo's acts & statements as to whether we see his taking Ship as the triumph of faith over hope, or vice versa.

I am struck by his responses in this chapter to his wounding, because he expresses the extremes of both defiance & despair, hope & hopelessness. Yet the thing we have to bear in mind is that however he responds here he is responding in extremis - he doesn't have the luxury to stop & weigh up his situation calmly & objectively. He is dogmatic, judgemental & condemnatory - towards himself most of all.

Once he is able to rest & make a decision he accepts the task of taking the Ring to the fire - but does he make that choice out of defiance or despair? Is there a point when he simply resigns himself to do the task at hand, because he believes it has been ordained that he will do it, &/or die in the attempt, but that either way he has no real say in the matter?

I'm struck by something from an early draft of the meeting between Bingo & Gildor:

'Half your heart wished to go, but the other half held you back; for its home was in the Shire, & its delight in bed & board & the voices of friends, & in the changing of the gentle seasons among the fields & trees. but since you are a hobbit that half is the stronger, as it was even in Bilbo. What has made it surrender?'
'Yes, I am an ordinary hobbit, & so I always shall be, I imagine,' said Bingo. 'But a most un-hobbitlike fate has been laid upon me.'
Then you are not an ordinary hobbit,' said Gildor, 'for otherwise that could not be so. But the half that is plain hobbit will suffer much I fear from being forced to follow the other half which is worthy of the strange fate, until it too becomes worthy (& yet remains hobbit). For that must be the purpose of your fate, or the purpose of that part of your fate which concerns you yourself. The hobbit half that loves the Shire is not to be despised but it has to be trained, & to rediscover the changing seasons & voices of friends when they have been lost

Return of the Shadow

This idea, that Frodo has a dual 'fate' seems significant, especially as, according to Gildor, only one part of that 'fate'concerns Frodo himself.