The Two Towers by J.R.R Tolkien (Harper Collins 1991, 2007) pp. 938, 939

By the time Frodo arrives at the foul smelling entrance to Shelob’s Lair he is already a dead man. Some might call him a dead man walking. Usually that means that others intend to kill him or have him killed. But in Frodo’s case there is a sense in which he has already given up on his own life.

Readers might remember the moment when he arrived at the Black Gate of Mordor and found it shut and impassable.

“His face was grim and set, but resolute. He was filthy, haggard and pinched with weariness, but he cowed no longer, and his eyes were clear. ‘I said so, because I purpose to enter Mordor, and I know no other way. Therefore I shall go this way. I do not ask anyone to go with me.”

Indeed we might go even further back to the moment when the Fellowship was broken and Frodo resolved to make the journey alone. This was not a choice he made out of hubris although he might have developed a feeling that only he could accomplish the task. But after the fall of Gandalf in Moria Frodo lost what hope he might have had. Now he knew that his mission was impossible, that it was beyond him. That it was beyond any of the company. That the Ring was too much for any of them. Of that last certainty he was even more sure after the treachery of Boromir.

So Frodo is hopeless. What I mean by this is that he does not expect to succeed. All he knows is that he is not allowed to give in. He has to keep on going. A few weeks ago we thought about a moment outside the haunted fortress of Minas Morgul when he was tempted to despair having just witnessed the hosts of the Lord of the Nazgûl march past him on their way to besiege Minas Tirith. On that occasion it was the Shire that called to him from a deep unconquered place within his soul, a place that lay deeper even than his despair. And Tolkien told us that “he even smiled grimly, feeling now as clearly as a moment before he had felt the opposite, that what he had to do, he had to do”.

So when Frodo asked Gollum whether the foul smelling tunnel that lay ahead of them was the only way it was not because he wished to discuss options. And if Gollum had replied that it was the only way, but that what lay before him was a monster, so terrible, that he had little or no chance of getting past it, it would have made little difference to him. We began this piece by describing him as a dead man walking. He has got past the stage of wondering whether he is going to get through this whole thing alive. He simply has to do his duty.

And he has little interest in whether Gollum is trustworthy or not. He has not put his trust in Gollum because he believes Gollum to be worthy of it. He has got past that as well. Sam is angered by Gollum, believing that he is going to betray them. Frodo knows deep within himself that his destiny is bound up with Gollum’s, perhaps in that same secret place within that took him past the despair he felt outside Minas Morgul, that same unconquered place that the darkness still cannot reach. And so he says to Sam:

It’s no good worrying about him now,.. We couldn’t have got so far, not even within sight of the pass, without him, and so we’ll have to put up with his ways. If he’s false, he’s false.”

As we have seen, and will see on other occasions, this grim determination, remarkable though it is, cannot be not enough. He would not have got far without Sam, whose cheerful optimism keeps him going through every hardship; and he would not have got far without Gollum whose knowledge of the way into Mordor is essential to the mission. But without his grim determination that goes deeper than any hope he would not be standing here. He would not be about to walk into Shelob’s Lair. The only way into Mordor.