Is Sauron Frodo's shadow?

[skip spence]

But in Lord of the Rings the importance of Sauron, personified evil, resides in the fact that he is an expression of Frodo. Seduced by power, Frodo spends the novel in the process of becoming Sauron - and that is only possible because part of him was Sauron to begin with. Perhaps the most profound perception in the entire story is Tolkien's realization that darkness can come from even the most innocent, simplest, cutest characters.

Well I think it's a great exaggeration to say that Frodo spends the novel becoming like Sauron, seduced by power. Yes, we know that's how the ring works more or less, but we also get very few insights into Frodo's mind suggesting he's becoming power-crazed, cruel or deceptive. The influence of the ring, I feel, is rather like a force from the outside that Frodo is resisting stoutly, but in the very end gives in to. It's not really a gradual process. If Tolkien's main point was depicting Frodo's inner struggles with the devil inside of him, he was not doing a very good job of it, methinks.

Tolkien was probably well aware that darkness can come from the cute and cuddly, but this is not emphasised at all in LotR, which to my mind is fairly black and white. The bad guys are them, the good guys are us. This is not entirely true of course, but in general you have a clear divide between completely flawless characters and utterly despicable crooks.

Did Frodo have a little Dark Lord in a hidden corner of his soul - a potential Sauron which the Ring fed?

Well, we all do, don't we? What the ring feeds on is lust for power. And power, as we all know, corrupts.