but someone else could.
that’s the whole point of frodo—there is nothing special about him, he’s a hobbit, he’s short and likes stories, smokes pipeweed and makes mischief, he’s a young man like other young men, except for the singularly important fact that he is the one who volunteers. there is this terrible thing that must be done, the magnitude of which no one fully understands and can never understand before it is done, but frodo says me and frodo says I will.
(when boromir is thinking of how he can use the ring to defend gondor, when aragorn is thinking of how it brought down proud isildur, when elrond is holding council and gandalf is thinking of how twisted he would become, if he ever dared—)
but then there’s frodo, who desires nothing except what he has already left behind him, and says, I will take the Ring.
it is an offer made out of absolute innocence, utter sincerity. It is made without knowing what it will make of him—and frodo loses everything to the ring, he loses peace and himself and the shire, he loses the ability to be in the world. It’s cruel, the ring is cruel, it searches out every weakness you have and feeds on it, drinks you dry and fills you with its poison instead, the ring is so cruel.
and frodo picks it up willingly. for no other reason except that it has to be done.
(the ring warps boromir into a hopeless grasping dead thing, the power of the palantir turns denethor into an old man, jealous and suspicious, it bends even saruman, once the proudest of the istari, into a mechanised warlord, sitting in his fortress and bent over his perverse creations—all the best of intentions, laid waste)
but there’s a reason gollum exists in the narrative, which is to show—well, to show what frodo might have been. because even as frodo grows mistrustful and wearied, as the burden of this ring grows heavier and heavier, he is never gollum. he is gentle to gollum. he is afraid—god frodo is so afraid for 2/3 of these books he is so tired and afraid, but he keeps moving, he walks though it would pull him into the ground, because he asked for this, he said he would.
someone else could have carried the ring to mordor, I suppose. the idea of a martyr is not dependent on the particular flesh and blood person dying for some greater purpose. but such a thing has to be chosen, lifted onto your shoulders for the right reason, the truest reasons, and followed into the dark, though it would see you burnt through and bled out.
I will take the Ring, though I do not know the way.
That’s not completely true.
There is a reason why it had to be Frodo and not anyone else, and there is something special about him. And there is something special about Hobbits.
All the strongest Men, Elves and Dwarves, who might seem like better choices for this task, are so mighty that they also pose too great a risk when they fail. The ring magnifies a person to the greatest extent possible; for someone who is already very powerful and filled with great purpose, the magnitude of their inversion would make them horribly dangerous. Aragorn with the ring, for instance, would succeed in ruling Gondor, but would turn it into another Mordor. Hobbits are small people with limited scope. Gollum becomes a force for evil, but only in the smallest ways. Hobbits like food and home; an inversion of that is a dark hovel under a mountain and cannibalism, but not global domination and destruction.
Hobbits are special because they are small, and their reach is short. But there is a quiet strength of character to them that makes Frodo the perfect ring-bearer.
Bilbo proves it first. He’s the only ring-bearer who held the ring for any significant length of time who was able to give it away by choice. How is that possible? All the strongest Men, Elves, and Dwarves were incapable of such a feat. Bilbo proves that a Hobbit can hold to a mission to abandon this ring long enough to do it.
But Frodo is like Gollum in the end. Like Gollum, like Bilbo, Frodo’s desire for the ring never dies, and he can’t complete the mission to destroy it on his own. What would have made even a step on that journey impossible for someone like Galadriel or Gandalf only stopped Frodo on the precipice, though.
So if it had to be a Hobbit, why did it have to be Frodo?
Frodo is not a young hobbit. He is the middle-aged, monied patron, the benevolent leader of a small group of adventurous young Hobbits willing to explore the boundaries of the Shire. If any Hobbit is going to take on a dangerous task, it had to be him. He wouldn’t hand over that burden to a young cousin, nor to his servant. He could have handed it back to Bilbo, but this problem is his inheritance. It’s his moral responsibility to take it himself.
And that is why it has to be Frodo who takes the ring to Mordor.
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