#tolkien #fantasy #middleearth
Q: Did Frodo’s Blood Innocence Help Him Fight the One Ring?
ANSWER: I received the following question from a reader in October 2021:
Could Frodo’s heroic resistance to the One Ring be connected to his avoidance of killing (or vice versa)?
As far as I can tell, Frodo was the only hobbit (indeed the only member) of the Fellowship who never killed anyone. He tried in desperation to stab the Lord of the Nazgûl, but did no damage, hacked at a Barrow-wight and wounded a troll, but he caused no deaths. Merry helped despatch the LOTN and killed the chief “ruffian”. Pippin killed a troll, and Sam felled at least one orc in Moria (we aren’t told much about their role in the Battle of Bywater). But, as Tolkien showed in the Prologue, and in the Scouring, while hobbits weren’t at all warlike, they were quite capable of defending themselves. So is it possible that Frodo was “chosen” as Ringbearer because the Authorities knew he would be better than most at avoiding shedding blood?
Fans of Xena: Warrior Princess will recall the phrase “blood innocence” describes the state of a person who has never killed or engaged in any significant violence. So far as I know, the phrase was never used before that TV show introduced it, although there are a couple of poems that come close to doing so.
The plot in Xena: Warrior Princess where the concept was introduced involved Xena’s companion Gabrielle. She had never slain anyone and was tricked into sacrificing a high priestess to a dark god (Dahak). [For what it’s worth, I always felt that scene was poorly done, as Gabrielle’s innocence in the matter was clear to the audience, if not to the characters – but I digress.]
So, back to Frodo, the Slaughterer of Hordes, the Murderer of Millions. I mean, think about it: if Frodo hadn’t had the gumption to take up the Ring and carry it across Middle-earth, there wouldn’t have been all those battles, right?
My question might seem facetious, but I think your question raises the issue of moral culpability. If I undertake a mission in which I know violence will occur, and others acting on my behalf and in my defence kill [admittedly “evil” creatures like Orcs and Trolls], am I culpable for those deaths in any measure for having created the situation which led to them?
We often accuse people of “having blood on their hands” if they support “the bad guys”, or if they engineer a situation which leads to death. Wrongful death lawsuits occur in the United States. I’ve read that in the United Kingdom the Fatal Accidents Act of 1846 (aka Lord Campbell’s Act) codified liability for causing another’s “wrongful” death. So even when J.R.R. Tolkien wrote The Lord of the Rings there were at least a few clear definitions of moral culpability for death.
It’s hard to imagine a Moria Orc family filing a lawsuit against Frodo or his legal heirs for “wrongful death” in the aftermath of the War of the Ring, but if you want to write some absurdist fan fiction (or maybe some thinly disguised political satire), I suppose you could construct a scenario where an Orc lawyer travels to the Shire to prosecute the claims. The Fellowship did trespass in Moria, after all. And they refused to submit to the authorities in charge of the ancient underground city.
All that aside, let’s say for the sake of discussion that Frodo Baggins, Esquire, bore no moral culpability for the deaths that occurred specifically because of his journey to Mordor (where for all intents and purposes he intended to kill Sauron by destroying the One Ring). Frodo clearly had murder in his heart at some point along the way (or not – was his heart fully into it?).
It’s perilous to cast this story in the light of morality, although others have attempted to do so. I’m not criticizing them, but for a relatively short blog post I can’t do the subject justice. Tolkien wrote about morality (and Middle-earth) on many occasions, and sometimes at great length. But one letter stands out for me when I think about your question:
I do not think that Frodo’s was a moral failure. At the last moment the pressure of the Ring would reach its maximum – impossible, I should have said, for any one to resist, certainly after long possession, months of increasing torment, and when starved and exhausted. Frodo had done what he could and spent himself completely (as an instrument of Providence) and had produced a situation in which the object of his quest could be achieved. His humility (with which he began) and his sufferings were justly rewarded by the highest honour; and his exercise of patience and mercy towards Gollum gained him Mercy: his failure was redressed.
We are finite creatures with absolute limitations upon the powers of our soul-body structure in either action or endurance. Moral failure can only be asserted, I think, when a man’s effort or endurance falls short of his limits, and the blame decreases as that limit is closer approached.
…
Frodo undertook his quest out of love – to save the world he knew from disaster at his own expense, if he could; and also in complete humility, acknowledging that he was wholly inadequate to the task. His real contract was only to do what he could, to try to find a way, and to go as far on the road as his strength of mind and body allowed. He did that. I do not myself see that the breaking of his mind and will under demonic pressure after torment was any more a moral failure than the breaking of his body would have been – say, by being strangled by Gollum, or crushed by a falling rock.
Letter No. 246 (drafts), September 1963
This argument brings us back to Tolkien’s quandry about the Orcs: were they truly evil? He struggled with defining what “evil” means within the contexts of his stories. The Orcs were slaves and there are a few scenes in The Lord of the Rings where Tolkien portrays them in a more human way. They had feelings, ambitions, and even doubts about what Sauron was doing (not doubts in the sense of “this is right and that is wrong”, but they questioned the decisions of their masters). Some Orcs even opposed Sauron (and apparently also rebelled against Morgoth).
But opposing Sauron and Morgoth wasn’t enough to relieve them of moral culpability in Tolkien’s mind. He wasn’t sure if they could be redeemable, or if so what it would take to redeem them. Whether descended from Elves or Men, however, the Orcs would have required an exemplary champion to save them. And these questions (on the origin and redeemability of Orcs) Tolkien was never able to answer satisfactorily.
And that brings me back to Frodo. Tolkien didn’t so much excuse him from moral culpability as argue that the story wasn’t about moral culpability. In another letter (No. 153) Tolkien wrote that “it is the Pity of Bilbo and later Frodo that ultimately allows the Quest to be achieved”. In Letter No. 181 Tolkien wrote “But at this point the ‘salvation’ of the world and Frodo’s own ‘salvation’ is achieved by his previous pity and forgiveness of injury.” The pity of which he wrote was Frodo’s pity for Gollum (Sméagol). Frodo could have killed him, or allowed Sam to, but he chose not only to allow Gollum to live, Frodo attempted (in his own way) to help Gollum find some goodness in himself. I don’t know if it’s enough to justify saying Frodo tried to help Gollum redeem himself.
And one must wonder if Gollum did redeem himself by defying the One Ring and stealing it back from Frodo at the end (thus saving the world).
How Could Frodo Resist the Ring for So Long?
I think people often forget that many other characters resisted the One Ring. Bilbo gave it up freely (with considerable help from Gandalf). Gandalf had at least 2 opportunities to take the Ring for himself and he refused to do so. He subsequently traveled with Frodo and the Ring for many weeks and never sought to take the Ring again.
Bombadil laughed when the Ring apparently tried to tempt him. Aragorn and Elrond and Galadriel all resisted the lure of the Ring. For that matter, so did Merry, Pippin, Legolas, and Gimli – all of whom traveled with Frodo for many weeks or months.
The Ring had many opportunities to entice someone to take it from Frodo, but it only succeeded one time – with Boromir, who immediately repented (probably only because Frodo put the Ring on and fled).
The Ring needed to spend months with Frodo (on the road) before it could finally overwhelm his will and induce him to lay claim to it. The Ring knew this claim would be immediately detected and contested by Sauron.
So I think there were limits (in Tolkien’s mind) to what the Ring could do. Sauron had to spend years in Númenor with Ar-Pharazôn before he finally succumbed to Sauron’s machinations. And Ar-Pharazôn was already tainted in spirit (both fearing death and rebelling against the Valar) when he accepted Sauron’s surrender.
If someone as evil as Ar-Pharazôn didn’t immediately succumb to Sauron’s will when Sauron was at the height of his power, I don’t think it should come as a surprise that Frodo was able to resist the Ring’s will for several months. Ar-Pharazôn may have succumbed sooner than Frodo, but Tolkien doesn’t imply that he fell completely under Sauron’s sway immediately. Sauron had to trick Ar-Pharazôn into taking him to Númenor.
All that said, we don’t have any other timeline to compare Frodo’s Quest to. It’s not fair to say that all the time Bilbo spent with the Ring (or Gollum’s centuries with it) reveal anything about the limits of the Ring’s power, except to say it never succeeded in convincing Gollum to take it closer to Sauron.
So Frodo was a naturally humble person, who felt and expressed pity toward a creature that had done great evil (Gollum), and he at least took the Ring in the direction the Ring desired to go. The final test was too much for Frodo, regardless of the fact he hadn’t killed anyone and despite his great acts of mercy and humility.
How Tolkien Described Frodo’s Resistance to the Ring
In Letter No. 246 Tolkien wrote:
Frodo had become a considerable person, but of a special kind: in spiritual enlargement rather than in increase of physical or mental power; his will was much stronger than it had been, but so far it had been exercised in resisting not using the Ring and with the object of destroying it. He needed time, much time, before he could control the Ring or (which in such a case is the same) before it could control him; before his will and arrogance could grow to a stature in which he could dominate other major hostile wills. Even so for a long time his acts and commands would still have to seem ‘good’ to him, to be for the benefit of others beside himself.
The situation as between Frodo with the Ring and the Eight might be compared to that of a small brave man armed with a devastating weapon, faced by eight savage warriors of great strength and agility armed with poisoned blades. The man’s weakness was that he did not know how to use his weapon yet; and he was by temperament and training averse to violence. Their weakness that the man’s weapon was a thing that filled them with fear as an object of terror in their religious cult, by which they had been conditioned to treat one who wielded it with servility…
Here even though Tolkien calls out Frodo’s “avers[sion] to violence”, he credits Frodo’s growth “in spiritual enlargement” due to “resisting not using the Ring and with the object of destroying it” for his “becoming a considerable person”.
He wasn’t that considerable person when he set out from Bag End to find Rivendell. I would say that what Tolkien meant was that Frodo’s aversion to violence helped him avoid committing the kinds of acts the Ring might have leveraged against him. He wasn’t as vulnerable to deception or subversion as Gollum and Ar-Pharazôn had been because they were both already violent or petty people when they came close to the Ring’s/Sauron’s influence.
Conclusion
To answer your question directly, after having mulled through all these minutiae, I don’t think Frodo’s reluctance to kill was the reason why he was able to resist the Ring for so long. He gradually succumbed to its influence, becoming more and more possessive of it as time passed.
Aragorn was a humble man. He also exercised pity (as when he offered the Orcs of Isengard a chance to withdraw from the Hornburg before they were destroyed). But Aragorn also killed plenty of enemies. I think Boromir fell to the Ring’s sway because he was already a bit arrogant – and the Ring apparently appealed to Boromir’s pride and arrogance.
Aragorn feared the Ring and didn’t want to take it. But I think even he would have fallen eventually if he had gone to Mordor with Frodo as he originally planned. Having read the story, the plot inevitably leads up to someone (or everyone) trying to take the Ring at the end, because it would have done whatever was necessary to survive and be reunited with Sauron.
As a veteran who had lived through one of the bloodiest wars in history, J.R.R. Tolkien had seen many men lose their innocence; he himself had passed through that portal of experience. He understood that war changes everyone. I think even Frodo was changed by his experiences with battle, even though he himself didn’t take any lives.
I’m not sure Tolkien would have agreed with the idea of blood innocence, but assuming he would have accepted it as a moral state of being, I think he might have questioned where it truly ended. Frodo kept insisting to Sam that only he could bear the burden of the Ring. That was in part the Ring’s influence on him (I believe), but it was also (I think) Frodo’s way of taking moral culpability for whatever happened – and sparing Sam (maybe) similar culpability. If I’m right, or at least if one sees the story that way, then I don’t think Frodo remained so spiritually innocent. But he did benefit from his long battle with the Ring in the end, because unlike others before him, he wasn’t interested in dominance and power.
See also
Could the Ring Have Influenced Bill Ferny in Bree?
Did the Ring Speak To Gollum on Mount Doom?
Did Ofermod Influence Frodo’s Decision To Claim the One Ring?
Who Did the One Ring Try to Corrupt in The Lord of the Rings?
Shhh! It’s A Secret Ring! (Classic Essay)
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Sparing Sam the burden and the guilt of wielding the Ring was Frodo’s victory. You nailed that, right at the end.
I don’t know how much of a victory it was, because he became possessive of the ring if only to keep it from corrupting those he cared about, and the ring used that possessiveness against him. Maybe if he had not spared Sam the burden, they would be able to destroy it together. Or I suppose it would probably have found a way to destroy both of them.
Great insights, thank you. This was my question: I suppose I could have framed it more generally as “Why was Frodo chosen?” During the ordeal in the Barrow, the narrator tells us that Bilbo and Gandalf both thought that Frodo was “the best hobbit in the Shire”, without elaborating on this. Bilbo, of course, could be accused of bias, however as a Maia in mufti Gandalf’s view would be worthy of respect. Yet Frodo’s qualifications for being the chosen Ring-bearer are not obvious in the early chapters: he is peevishly outraged that Gollum still lives, and suggests to Sam that he deserves to be turned into a toad if he disclosed what he’s heard. His strengths emerge only gradually, which is fair enough in a long tale.
Wow, that’s a lot to think about. I personally think it also made a difference that Frodo was freely given the Ring. I think he was the only Ring-bearer to acquire it as a gift (setting aside the matter of Tom). So his possession of the Ring was untainted, as it were. I think he was also the only Ring-bearer who tried to give the Ring away. Whatever his personal flaws were, they weren’t directly related to the Ring, and that might have made it harder for the Ring to use his flaws against him.
I also suspect that Gollum fell into the fire because the Ring commanded him to, and that the Ring was simply executing Frodo’s stated wishes. Frodo had said earlier, “In the last need, Sméagol, I should put on the Precious; and the Precious mastered you long ago. If I, wearing it, were to command you, you would obey, even if it were to leap from a precipice or to cast yourself into the fire. And such would be my command.” As you say, the Ring had completely overcome Frodo’s will, but I think Frodo had, in a small way, begun to bend the Ring to his will. That might be why it was sometimes hard to tell if it was Frodo or the Ring that was talking on the slopes of Mount Doom.
Regarding whether it’s okay to kill orcs, I think Tolkien had an answer for that. As you probably know, he said:
“But even before this wickedness of Morgoth was suspected the Wise in the Elder Days taught always that the Orcs were not ‘made’ by Melkor, and therefore were not in their origin evil. They might have become irredeemable (at least by Elves and Men), but they remained within the Law. That is, that though of necessity, being the fingers of the hand of Morgoth, they must be fought with the utmost severity, they must not be dealt with in their own terms of cruelty and treachery. Captives must not be tormented, not even to discover information for the defence of the homes of Elves and Men. If any Orcs surrendered and asked for mercy, they must be granted it, even at a cost.† This was the teaching of the Wise, though in the horror of the War it was not always heeded.
† [footnote] Few Orcs ever did so in the Elder Days, and at no time would any Orc treat with any Elf. For one thing Morgoth had achieved was to convince the Orcs beyond refutation that the Elves were crueller than themselves, taking captives only for ‘amusement’, or to eat them (as the Orcs would do at need).” (HoMe vol. 10, part 5, text X)
It’s interesting, and humbling, to think that the orcs, in addition to being filled with hate and rage by Sauron, were also the victims of something as banal as prejudice.