Let's Read Tolkien 75: Mount Doom

Sam put his ragged orc-cloak under his master's head, and covered them both with the grey robe of Lórien; and as he did so his thoughts went out to that fair land, and to the Elves, and he hoped that the cloth woven by their hands might have some virtue to keep them hidden beyond all hope in this wilderness of fear.

Frodo and Sam are in the ashen waste of Mordor, and their next stop is the Mountain of Fire. As they recover from their forced march, Sam works out that their provisions will last to Mount Doom, but no further. They're on a one-way trip, but Sam decides that if that's the way it is, then that's what they'll do. Before his steely resolution to die in Mordor, Sam commits the most appalling example of wishful thinking in the entire damn book.

"I can't think somehow that Gandalf would have sent Mr. Frodo on this errand, if there hadn't a' been any hope of his ever coming back at all," he thinks to himself. Can we just take a moment to remember that the original cause of this whole mess, so to speak, was Gandalf's decision to send Bilbo on a ludicrous dragon-hunt that frankly had no actual chance whatsoever of succeeding, not least because it included a crossing of Mirkwood that would have ended in the entire travelling circus troupe starving to death in Wilderland. So I find it very difficult to share Sam's faith in Gandalf's notions of logistics.

As the two hobbits make their way toward the Mountain, the land around them is empty: Sauron has concentrated his forces against Aragorn's army, including all the Nazgûl, who might conceivably have detected the Ring-bearer. To lighten their load, Frodo and Sam dump all their orc-gear and most of their other equipment, including Sam's cooking gear. Frodo wears only his elven-cloak, belted with a piece of rope: a monastic, almost Christ-like outfit, continuing the ascetic theme of the previous chapter. They trudge toward the Mountain, and when Frodo becomes too exhausted to go on, Sam carries him on his back for a while.

Soon thereafter, they strike the road that leads from the Dark Tower to Sammath Naur, the Chambers of Fire inside Mount Doom. As they crawl up the mountain, Gollum attacks Frodo, who manages to fight him off. Sam stays behind to fend off Gollum, but can't bring himself to kill the creature. Gollum slinks off, and Sam follows Frodo into the Mountain.

So here they finally are: Frodo and Sam have arrived at the Crack of Doom. Frodo, however, decides he's not going to destroy the Ring: he claims it for himself and puts it on. Sauron perceives this and gets a bit of a fright, and the Nazgûl are sent racing for the Mountain on their flying beasts. However, Gollum knocks Sam down and attacks Frodo. They struggle, and Gollum bites Frodo's ring-finger clean off, Ring and all. As he celebrates recovering his Precious, Gollum dances too close to the edge of the Crack, and falls in. The Ring is destroyed; Sam drags Frodo out as the Dark Tower falls and the Mountain begins to erupt.

**

I feel like it's an incredibly appropriate coincidence that my post on this chapter falls on December! I'm also a little bit shocked that Frodo and Sam made it to the end of the main quest in the third chapter of the last book.

The theme of Frodo as a Christ-figure is very explicit here: he suffers as he bears the Ring, his cross, toward the final destination. Along the way, Sam carries him for a while, as Simon of Cyrene carried Christ's cross, but Frodo makes the last leg on his own. You can argue that Sam was Simon twice: first when he bore the Ring when Frodo was captured, then again when he bore Frodo.

When I talked about Tolkien and allegory earlier, I mentioned Eärendil as one of Tolkien's Christ-characters. Obviously Frodo is another, but as with Eärendil, Frodo is not Christ, but prefigures him. Like Christ, Frodo suffers on his way to Golgotha and there makes a sacrifice to save mankind, but there are key differences. Unlike Eärendil, Frodo does not bridge the gap between humanity and God, and most crucially, Frodo is not himself divine.

A long, long time ago, I wrote that the Christian heresy Tolkien was most concerned with was Pelagianism. Pelagianism, at least as understood by Tolkien, holds that the original sin did not irrevocably corrupt human nature, and therefore, people can resist sin. This theme comes to its conclusion when Frodo fails his mission. Letters, 191:

No, Frodo "failed". It is possible that once the ring was destroyed he had little recollection of the last scene. But one must face the fact: the power of Evil in the world is not finally resistible by incarnate creatures, however "good"; and the Writer of the Story is not one of us.

Like I said earlier, if this was Harry Potter and the Ring of Power, none of this would be a problem: the Ring could be used at no risk, and even if it was somehow found to be dangerous, it could, in Shippey's words, be set aside - as the Deathly Hallows were in the miserable transphobe lady's books. In Tolkien's theology, the Ring is a Machine with a capital m (when not actually sin itself), and will therefore not only corrupt anyone using it, but cannot actually be defeated by human or hobbit agency. The original sin means that everyone, including Frodo, has fallen into sin, and therefore cannot, through their own will, triumph over it. So even though Frodo is a Christ-like figure who goes through an extensive ascesis, climbs the Mountain of Doom and is prepared to sacrifice everything to defeat evil, in the end he can't do it. If he could, Christ's sacrifice on the Cross, the event which Frodo's entire journey prefigures, would be meaningless: we wouldn't need him for anything, because we could simply decide to not sin. Because this would put us theology majors out of a job, it is unacceptable. Frodo's quest has to fail. Gollum has to be there to inadvertently finish the job.

Does that mean Frodo's suffering was in vain? Not really, because like Éowyn at the Pelennor, it's Frodo's efforts that make the eucatastrophe possible: if Frodo hadn't hauled the Ring all the way to the Mountain, Gollum couldn't have fallen into the volcano with it.

So was it divine intervention that pushed Gollum over the edge? And if it was, couldn't God then have come up with other interventions, like the one on Amon Hen, to get Frodo there? Is it vitally important for the future that Bilbo, or for that matter Frodo or Sam, didn't kill Gollum - or would god have stopped them, or come up with a different intervention in the Sammath Naur? This is the pointless philosophical hole theology digs itself into when you want both an omnipotent and benevolent god, and a meaningful role for human free will. For Tolkien, Frodo's choices and sacrifices did matter, even if in the end, he couldn't prevail.

But if you want to boil the whole Lord of the Rings down into one message, this is it: sin corrupts, and people can't defeat it on their own, without divine assistance.

**

Next time: a party.