Lessons in Life Taught by Hobbits by Anne Marie Gazzolo

There are many different journeys the souls of hobbits, elves, men and dwarves take during the War of the Ring, but none deeper, darker and more illuminating than Frodo’s and Sam’s. I wish to focus on the journeys of those two souls in this essay.

We are all put on this planet for a specific purpose. It was in Frodo’s humble acceptance of becoming a vessel through which a higher Power could work that he and we learn why he was created. He did not know Who that Power was, but he belonged to a people who though, as St. Paul says, did not have the law, still kept it as if by instinct, having it written in their hearts (Rom 2:14-15). As can happen to us if we are open to it, Frodo’s mind may not have understood why he responded the way he did, but his heart and soul understood; for love and grace spoke there in a language that the mind does not always comprehend, but the heart and soul always do. Frodo became the suffering servant, a sacrificial lamb. It took great courage to offer himself up, to continue being the Ring-bearer, after it had already nearly killed him; to endure and fight against the rape of his mind and soul; to suffer those demonic assaults for months so that no one else would have to; to carry his cross all the way to Mount Doom. He was given extra grace through his life to strengthen him, to prepare him to endure it all, and given the greatest grace of all in having Sam at his side. He also showed mercy and compassion and true caring for Sméagol; for he knew what that tormented creature was suffering since he was growing addicted to the same thing and was being torn apart by the same desires. He was every bit a hero, and as the story unfolds there is no doubt that he will succeed in his Quest.

It is surprising, then, that he was crushed in the end. He was the hero, wasn’t he? Heroes don’t fail. But this is more than a fairy tale with a happy ending. This is closer to reality than those tales. And there is more than one hero. The ever-faithful Sam is revealed to be an even greater hero, something he would never have considered himself to be, but whom everyone, especially Frodo, recognized as such. And Frodo was still very much one himself, even though he was overcome at last by his burden, heavier than anyone should have ever had to bear - and he bore it for months, with little complaint. He did it because he chose to, because he loved Middle-earth and its people, and if he could save them, he would do anything to do so. But in the end - or what appeared to be the end - he could not save himself, and had it not been for Gollum, he would have perished, and with him all Middle-earth. Salvation came from a surprising, unlooked-for source. In Frodo’s abandonment of the Quest, the Power Who had been guiding and guarding him all the while made sure that the Quest succeeded. Good was drawn out of evil.

That is the true power of Professor Tolkien’s sub-creation of the War of the Ring and its many heroes which makes it resound more than pat, happily-ever-after, the hero-never-shows-any-weakness fairy tales. In reality, even heroes have moments of frailty, doubts and fears. Frodo and Sam and every other hero had all those, but they also did what they needed to do, despite them. Sam had no idea how to proceed after Frodo had apparently been killed, but he went on because he knew the Quest was too important to be allowed to fail. He was terrified to enter the Tower of Cirith Ungol, but he did so out of love for his master. Frodo was so frightened that his will was nearly paralyzed, but he knew what he had to do, and he did it. He was tired, cold, and hungry, but he went on out of love. He was twisted inside out by the Ring, but he fought against it, and when he failed, he got up and fought again. He was intent on saving everyone else even as he came to understand more and more that it would come at the cost of himself. He was spent bit by bit on that journey, poured out like a sacrifice. His body seemed too small for all he had to endure, but not his heart. He gave and gave and gave. He sacrificed everything so that those he loved and so many others whom he did not even know, but still wished to save, would not have to sacrifice anything. The Ring did not spare Frodo’s heart any more than it did his body, tearing it to shreds as it weakened his frame in its quest to dominate him. Still he went on, holding onto those shreds, pushing past his tears, doubts, terror and despair; holding on because his Sam still had hope; going on despite starvation and dehydration; knowing all along that he would not be able to give up the Ring, but still completely set on destroying it, even if it meant dying with it; struggling to the point of crawling when he was too weakened by his suffering and the weight of the Ring to do anything else.

We can and must do the same. Frodo’s journey is our own. Like the vast majority of us, he did not fight in combat as did the soldiers of Rohan and Gondor. Like all of us, his battlefield was in his own mind, heart and soul. He was, and we are, continually engaged in spiritual warfare, and it is not a battleground we can leave until death takes us from it. This is not to discourage us or cause us to despair, but to give us patience and strength to endure the battle and win the war. We are all Ring-bearers of one kind or another, struggling with our own fears, troubles and addictions. We all do hateful, hurtful things to those we do or should love the most. We all sometimes give into the seductive call of temptation, hate or anger. We all sometimes desire things that we know are bad for us, things that can or have hurt us or others and will continue to do so; things that perhaps we try to pull away from, but still want and cannot part from without great strength of will and humble asking for God’s assistance. Tolkien, the master storyteller, was inspired by the Master Himself, to have his tale resound with such truth.

Watching Frodo’s struggle, we see that sometimes we can overcome our temptations and sometimes they overcome us, but like him, each time we can get back up when we fall and start the struggle anew. We can walk away from the drinking, the drugs, the slot machines, the toxic relationships, whatever is poisoning us. We can say no to hate and anger and the hurt and violence it causes. We can choose another path. We may fail many times; we may fail in the end, or we may succeed, depending on how open we are to receiving and responding to the grace that is available to us. Even if we fail, mercy can be given to us, if that is our part in the Music.

If we are fortunate, we will have a Sam with us, supporting us; for this struggle is not one we can win alone, but it can be won. It must be won if we are not to be totally lost. We can learn as much or even more from Samwise the stouthearted, Samwise the loving, as we can from Frodo. Both hobbits show that we must stay the course even when it becomes difficult and seemingly impossible to finish or even survive.

Perhaps our part in the Music is to be a Sam for someone, to love as fiercely and unconditionally as he loved, perhaps also to suffer as he did as he watched his beloved master’s torment, but kept loving all the same; to stand by our Frodo through every hardship; to be their light and their strength and hope; to be willing even to die for them or with them. Imagine what the world would be like if we could all love and be loved as deeply and purely as Sam loved his Frodo and his Rosie. Beautiful, isn’t it? Or perhaps we shall be saved through totally unexpected means or persons, to mercies we gave and receive back.

There is another part of the story that deviates once more from the fairy tale to reality, in that not all veterans of war who come back home come back whole. Frodo sacrificed everything to destroy the Ring, including his mental health. He was broken by "knife, sting, and tooth, and a long burden" (LotR 967), and there would be no rest or healing for him within Middle-earth. He and everyone else assumed to be Ring-bearer also meant to be Ring-destroyer, and he suffered from the guilt and shame of giving in at the last after all he had endured to get to the Fire. But to destroy the Ring was not his part in the Music. It was merely to get the Ring to where it could be destroyed. The One Who had chosen him knew it would in the end be too much for him, but knew also that he would fulfill what he had been created to do, having fully corresponded with the grace he had been given, being truly named Bronwe anthan Harthad - Endurance Beyond Hope (Sauron Defeated: The History of Middle-earth, Vol IX 62). The Music continued to play out, though parts of it were heartbreaking.

Frodo came back, slowly shattering, to an already shattered Shire. It was a terrible shock and he had to have wondered, for what did I leave? After all the soul-lacerating pain he had willingly endured for months just so his beloved land would remain safe, he returned to find it just as violated as he had been. But even then, he showed mercy and forgiveness to Saruman who attacked and tried to kill him; just as he had forgiven Sméagol for the betrayal to Shelob. These two acts are among the most powerful lessons he had learned from Sam who forgave him and from the Ring which showed him how good could be corrupted, and in learning, he was able to teach us.

But though the Shire healed of its wounds, Frodo did not. He never truly dealt with the trauma of being the victim of very brutal and repeated rape; and worse, he still desired his assailant. In this lesson we learn how not to behave. After the initial joy of surviving, something of which he had long despaired, Frodo suffered from an "unreasoning self-reproach: he saw himself and all that he had done as a broken failure" (Carpenter, Letters 328). He did not speak to anyone of his troubles, and therein lay his mistake. He spoke and wrote of his despair while on the journey, but little of the torment that filled him afterwards, not wishing to burden anyone, especially his Sam. "We fear to say too much," Merry told Aragorn after being pulled back from the Black Breath (LotR 802). Frodo may have also remembered Sam’s words in the Tower that he would never forget the torments there, if he kept talking about them. So he kept his pain quiet, except when it surfaced, perhaps even without his conscious knowledge, during his anniversary illnesses. These were the most obvious signs of post-traumatic stress disorder, but not the only ones. That Frodo "dropped quietly out of all the doings of the Shire" (LotR 1002) is another sign of his increasing depression and isolation. It would have been humiliating for him to admit to anyone that he still wanted the Ring; perhaps pride prevented him from confessing that, perhaps shame did. That is something anyone of a good and sensitive nature, such as his, would have felt. How many times has that happened to us as well in one form or another and we have denied ourselves the opportunities to heal? Perhaps also the poison of Saruman’s parting words, that he would not have health or long life, infected his already lacerated soul and prevented it from healing.

In the end Frodo believed that to heal, or at least to have the hope of healing, he must make the heartbreaking decision to leave all but one of those for whom he endured such bitter suffering. This had already been foreseen and prayed about by Galadriel as far back as Lothlórien when the rents in his soul were not anywhere as bad as they became and by Arwen when she offered him her place on the ship West. Gandalf had seen it when Frodo’s first anniversary illness manifested itself on their way back home. Frodo long kept secret Arwen’s gift to him, but he came to the same conclusion the others already had. Another sacrifice was called for and it was to be the greatest of them all. Our hearts break for him and with him, but we also understand that his heart was already broken, and he felt it could not be mended in any other way. It seems a punishment, but it was actually a blessing and reward for his labor; an opportunity for the peace and rest he could not find in the Shire; a means to fully understand why he was chosen among all the Children of Ilúvatar to bear the Ring; and a way to discover that he was not only the beloved child of Primula and Drogo, but a very deeply loved one of his Creator Whose vessel he had agreed to be and Who had already sent him dreams of his future home that he would remember on seeing the shores upon which he would make his new life. There he would gain, we hope, "a truer understanding of his position in littleness and in greatness" (Letters 328) and come to understand that the Ring had claimed him, he hadn’t claimed it; that no one could have endured when he couldn’t in the end and that he had endured longer than anyone dared hope, longer than anyone else could have. He would have understood it was not an evil with which only his own soul was afflicted to continue to desire the Ring, but that it was a burden that all Ring-bearers carried. He would have understood that he did not suffer from some terrible weakness that no one else did as we perhaps feel when we surrender to temptation and then think that no one else would have.

We can do the same as he did. We cannot go to ‘Arda Unmarred,’ but if we are strong enough and humble enough, we can go to that person through whom God will choose to work, to whom we can offer the pieces of our broken hearts and have them molded back together and returned to us whole. Yes, it is humiliating, but it is healing and releasing. Pain shared is pain halved. Pain held in is pain doubled. Through admitting our faults and having sincere sorrow for them, we can also come to understand how greatly loved we are by our Creator.

Another lesson we sorely need in our era of broken promises and betrayal of friends and spouses, is the shining example of love, faithfulness and devotion of Sam and Rosie, who were open to the gift of life and celebrated their golden anniversary and far beyond, surrounded by their many children. It is a shame that such selflessness is not at all understood and is indeed criticized by our ‘Me and only me’ society. Ask anyone who dares to have more than two children. But Sam and Rosie show that where there is great and true love, many miracles can happen.

We can also hope that one day Sam saw a radiant being on the white shores of the West, and beheld Frodo who had come through his journey from "a hobbit broken by a burden of fear and horror [...], and made into something quite different" (Letters 186), and so ran to embrace his heart’s brother and "they all settled down and lived together happily ever after" (LotR 266).

It is also through Merry and Pippin, Aragorn, Gimli, Legolas and every soldier of Rohan and Gondor that we see bright examples of perseverance, loyalty and dedication to completing even seemingly impossible tasks. They discovered they were braver than they ever thought they could be and did what they needed to do because others they loved depended on them. They learned as we have that evil is alive and well in the world, but such powers "cannot conquer for ever!" (LotR 687) as Frodo boldly proclaims at the Cross-roads. This tale and the stories of the saints and heroes throughout the ages show that "[...] evil labours with vast power and perpetual success - in vain: preparing always only the soil for unexpected good to sprout in" (Letters 76); for out of the darkness and because of the darkness, many heroic acts of love, faith, humility and self-sacrifice abound. This is the greatest lesson: the Shadow will not endure forever; Love and Light will.

May the light of all the myriad heroes whose stories Professor Tolkien retold "in this very nick of time" (LotR 236) be a beacon for us as well to draw strength and inspiration from when we must make our own journeys to Mordor or confront the Shadow in other ways and places.

© 2009 Anne Marie Gazzolo