Frodo Baggins

• 1. Introduction

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  Frodo Baggins is a hobbit of the Shire who, on the 22nd of September, shares a birthday with his cousin Bilbo. That shared birthday is one small thread in a web that will eventually bind Frodo to the most consequential object in Middle-earth: the One Ring of the Dark Lord Sauron. When Frodo was 12, his parents Drogo Baggins and Primula Brandybuck died in a boating accident. Nine years followed in Brandy Hall with his maternal family. Then Bilbo brought him to Bag End, introduced him to Elvish languages, and took him on long walks through the countryside. None of it looks, from the outside, like preparation for anything extraordinary. Frodo's name comes from the Old English Fróda, meaning "wise by experience". He will earn every syllable of it. What the quest demands of him, and what it costs him, is not a story of triumph. Tolkien scholar Verlyn Flieger calls Frodo "the most tragic" of all the heroes in The Lord of the Rings. The questions worth sitting with are not whether he succeeds, but what success of that kind actually does to a person.

• 2. The Burden Begins

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  Bilbo departs the Shire and leaves Frodo the ring along with Bag End, and for 17 years Frodo keeps the object hidden and unused. During those years it gives him the same unusual longevity and youthful appearance it had once given Bilbo. Then Gandalf returns with the news that the ring is the One Ring, and that Sauron is actively searching for it. Frodo grasps immediately that staying in the Shire makes the Shire a target. He sets out with his gardener Sam Gamgee and his cousins Merry Brandybuck and Pippin Took, heading for Rivendell and the Elf-lord Elrond. The timing is close. Sauron's nine most powerful servants, the Nazgul, have already entered the Shire as Black Riders. At the Prancing Pony inn, the One Ring slips unbidden onto Frodo's finger in the common room, turning him invisible and drawing the Nazgul to the hobbits' empty rooms that very night. On Weathertop, five Nazgul attack the camp. The Witch-king of Angmar stabs Frodo with a Morgul blade, a wound designed to transform its victim into a wraith in the service of the Nazgul. Elrond heals Frodo at Rivendell, but the wound will not fully leave him. At the Council of Elrond, Frodo steps forward to carry the Ring into Mordor. Bilbo, now living in Rivendell, gives him the sword Sting and a coat of mithril mail that will later save his life when an Orc spear catches him in the mines of Moria.

• 3. Pity and Peril

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  Gollum has been tracking Frodo and Sam through the wilds, drawn by the Ring he lost to Bilbo long before. When he attacks, Frodo subdues him with Sting, but instead of killing him, Frodo chooses to spare his life and press him into service as a guide. Sam objects. Frodo insists. Thomas P. Hillman, a Tolkien scholar, writes that Frodo's compassion for Gollum helps defend him against the Ring's temptation. The guide leads them south into Ithilien and into an encounter with Faramir, younger brother of the fallen Boromir. Frodo enters a web of feudal-style obligations that Tolkien scholar Michael Stanton later describes in the J.R.R. Tolkien Encyclopedia: Frodo functions simultaneously as a feudal master to Sam and Gollum, and as a vassal to Faramir. He is obliged by Faramir to lure Gollum into captivity, an act Gollum experiences as betrayal. At the top of the Endless Stair, the tunnel entrance to Mordor turns out to be the lair of the giant spider Shelob. Gollum has led them here deliberately, hoping to retake the Ring once Shelob kills them. Shelob stings Frodo into unconsciousness. Sam drives her off with Sting and the Phial of Galadriel, then, believing Frodo dead, takes the Ring himself and continues forward. He soon overhears Orcs confirm that Frodo is alive and being taken for questioning.

• 4. The Failure at the Crack

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  Sam rescues Frodo from the Orc tower and returns the Ring. The two hobbits, dressed in scavenged Orc armour with Gollum still trailing them, make for Mount Doom. At the Cracks of Doom, Frodo enters the chasm where Sauron had originally forged the Ring, walks to the precipice, and then does not drop it. He claims it for himself, putting it on. The Ring's power, building across the entire journey, proves in the end too great for any mortal bearer to resist. Tolkien scholar Thomas P. Hillman states plainly that no mortal could have resisted its power indefinitely. It is Gollum who resolves the crisis: he bites off Frodo's finger, reclaims the Ring, and in his dancing elation falls with it into the fire. The Ring is destroyed. Sauron's power collapses. Frodo and Sam are pulled from the erupting mountain by Great Eagles. The Tolkien critic Paul H. Kocher points to Gandalf's remark that Frodo was "meant" to have the Ring, and that providence guided events toward this outcome while still preserving Frodo's choice to co-operate with that purpose. The destruction owes something to Frodo's mercy toward Gollum three decades earlier in the story, a mercy that kept Gollum alive long enough to stumble into the volcano.

• 5. Homecoming and Its Costs

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  Aragorn's coronation marks the public end of the war, but the four hobbits return to a Shire that has been taken over by the fallen wizard Saruman and industrialized by his agents. Frodo and his companions lead a rebellion and drive the intruders out. Saruman tries personally to stab Frodo before being killed by his own henchman Grima Wormtongue. Frodo lets Saruman go rather than see him harmed. The pattern is consistent: even at the moment of greatest personal provocation, Frodo's instinct is toward mercy. Michael Stanton writes that Frodo lacks Sam's simple sturdiness, and that his courage, selflessness, and fidelity make him ideal as a Ring-bearer, but also make him, as good characters tend to be, less outwardly exciting than evil ones. The Shire is restored. Frodo is not. Both medical and Tolkien scholars have suggested he may suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder. He withdraws from society, relives traumatic experiences through vivid flashbacks, and carries chronic pain from the Weathertop wound in his shoulder. The pull the Ring exerted on him has been likened by scholars to addiction, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and psychological abuse. In Frodo's own words, returning to the Shire felt "like falling asleep again". Two years after the Ring's destruction, he and Bilbo, as Ring-bearers, are granted passage to Valinor, the earthly paradise.

• 6. Name, Myth, and Meaning

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  Tolkien scholar Tom Shippey notes that Frodo's name is the only prominent hobbit name not explained in Tolkien's Appendices. A letter from Tolkien identifies it as the Old English Fróda, connected to the root fród, meaning "wise by experience". Shippey traces the name further: the Old Norse equivalent Fródi appears in Beowulf as the minor figure Fróda, and Saxo Grammaticus and Snorri Sturluson both describe Fródi as a peaceful ruler at the time of Christ. Fródi's era, the Fróda-frið or peace of Fródi, was created by a magic mill worked by two female giants that could grind out peace and gold. When Fródi worked the giants too hard, they rebelled and ground out an army instead, which killed him and took over, making the giants grind salt until the sea was full of it. Shippey's observation is direct: evil, in this mythological tradition, cannot be permanently cured. Frodo, he writes, is likewise a peacemaker and in the end a pacifist. Tolkien's name for Frodo in the fictional Westron language was Maura Labingi; maur- was hobbitish for "wise", the equivalent of the Germanic fród-. In drafts of the final chapters, published as Sauron Defeated, Gandalf names Frodo Bronwe athan Harthad, meaning "Endurance Beyond Hope". Tolkien also wrote the poem "The Sea-Bell", published in 1962 in The Adventures of Tom Bombadil with the subtitle Frodos Dreme, suggesting it represents the despairing dreams that visited Frodo in the Shire after the Ring's destruction: a speaker who journeys to a land across the sea, fails to connect with anyone there, descends into near-madness, and returns utterly alienated from those he once knew.

• 7. On Stage and Screen

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  Ralph Bakshi's 1978 animated version of The Lord of the Rings cast Christopher Guard as the voice of Frodo. The 1980 Rankin/Bass television adaptation of The Return of the King gave the role to Orson Bean, who had already played Bilbo in the same company's version of The Hobbit. The "massive" 1981 BBC radio serial cast Ian Holm as Frodo; Holm later played Bilbo in Peter Jackson's film adaptation. In the 1991 Leningrad Television two-part teleplay Khraniteli, Frodo was played by Valery Dyachenko, and in the Finnish broadcaster Yle's 1993 miniseries Hobitit, the role went to Taneli Mäkelä. Peter Jackson's trilogy from 2001-2003 gave the role to the American actor Elijah Wood. Dan Timmons, writing in a 2004 collection called Tolkien on Film, argued that the films' themes were undermined by the portrayal of Frodo. The film critic Roger Ebert wrote that he missed the depth of characterisation he felt in the book, observing that Frodo did little but watch other characters decide his fate and occasionally gaze upon the Ring. Peter Travers of Rolling Stone took the opposite view, writing that Wood played the role with "soulful conviction" and that his portrayal matured as the story progressed. Wood reprised the role briefly in The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey. On stage, James Loye played Frodo in the three-hour Toronto production that opened in 2006 and transferred to London in 2007. Joe Sofranko played the role in Cincinnati productions of all three volumes for Clear Stage Cincinnati across 2001-2003.