Frodo at Sammath Naur

[davem]

Essex, The question of failure is complex. How & why he did or didn't fail goes to the heart of the story. I can only repeat that if he succeeded then we have Tolkien saying we fallen creatures can save ourselves & have no need of any outside intervention, which as a Catholic he would never have even thought, let alone written & put his name to. He does fail at last, because the task is too big for him. He claims the Ring for himself, with all that entails, because he cannot bear the thought of a future without it, or any 'future' at all, if his cri de coeur 'There is no real going back' is anything to go by. He can't go back so as far as he's concerned there's no point. He can't have the past back, so he feels all is pointless.

He succeeds up to a point, & gets farther than any of us would have done, but in the end he fails. He doesn't destroy the Ring. He claims it for his own. Moral failure - a stark, harsh, thing to say but a fact, & inevitable. Frodo knows it, & he blames himself for it, because at the end, back in the Shire, he still believes he should have succeeded. As Tolkien says, one of the reasons he has to go into the West is to learn that, like Bilbo, he is only a little person in a wide world, & his desire to be a hero & save the world was beyond him. Even at the end he can say to Sam 'I tried to save the world', but he can then add 'and it has been saved' (implication: but I failed to do it all by myself, so I have to leave).

I'm not saying Frodo failed in a condemnatory way, as if to imply that someone else would have succeeded. I'm just saying that in the end he failed, because he gave in & claimed the Ring, which everyone else would have done, & most a lot sooner. I'm saying we are all fallen, & will all fail in the end, because the task is too big for us to succeed at alone - whatever certain writers may say about building a 'republic of heaven'!