LotR -- Book 6 - Chapter 9 - The Grey Havens

[davem]

Originally Posted by Child

Can there really be a doubt that Frodo made it to Elvenhome when Tolkien discusses this so explicitly in his Letters?

Yes, but..

Whether Frodo came to Tol Eressea is not the question - I don't doubt that he did (I can't see the Grey Ship doing a Titanic ). I was asking how Sam knew what had actually happened to Frodo, or what he had experienced. So much emphasis is placed on LotR being a translation of the Red Book. This is the only inexplicable event - no-one in Middle-earth could have known what happened to Frodo after he left the Havens. The only possibility is that Sam took Frodo's vision in the House of Bombadil as just that: a vision of a future event, &, believing that to be the case, stated it as a fact.

This opens up some very interesting questions - was Frodo's vision a kind of promise on Eru/the Valar's part, sort of 'If you see the Quest through, Frodo, this is what you'll get', or was Frodo somehow stepping outside serial time & seeing an actual future event; so that, in some sense, that 'future' had already happened, his 'story' having already been 'written', so that in his dream he was kind of flipping to the end of the book & reading the last page. He is both participant in, & 'reader' of, his own story. But if Frodo was seeing the end of his own already written story, how much free will did he actually have? Could he have altered his own story by his free choices when he had already seen how it would end? If his vision is a glimpse of his future then everything that happened to him was pre-ordained, already 'written'. Where is free will in this scenario?

Of course, Flieger has already explored this in depth.

But none of this gets us any further in answering the question: how did Sam (or whichever later redactor put it in) know what Frodo saw?