We Need to Talk about Frodo

Peter Jackson and the Cult of the Child

*Please note: This article assumes that the reader has a basic familiarity with at least one of the following: The live-action film version of The Lord of the Rings, or the books upon which they are based.

It is also a long article that may not fit in your email client. If you have trouble with it, you can read it on the web at http://jdanielsawyer.substack.com

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The first film in Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy hit theaters during the 2001 Christmas season. In America, at least, the timing couldn’t have been better. While the Tolkien geek set had been obsessing for years over set leaks and rumors of what—for them (us)—was the most anticipated film of their lives, the attacks of September 11, 2001 set the stage for The Lord of the Rings to become something far more universal.

The 1990s had been an era of great film-making, but much of its greatest work was very dark indeed. It was a fitting aesthetic for the party at the end of the world (for those of us who lived through it, the end of the Cold War really did feel like the end of everything we’d ever known). Directors like David Fincher (Se7en, Fight Club), Quentin Tarantino (Pulp Fiction, Reservoir Dogs), Sam Mendes (American Beauty), and even Mike Judge (Office Space, Beavis and Butthead Do America) brought us films that—funny or serious—meditated on the surprising emptiness at the core of American life. The high water of the Cold War had receded, and with it our two-generations-long raison d’etre (fighting the Evil Empire) had suddenly ebbed away.

Like Titanic a few years earlier, The Fellowship of the Ring brought a moment of beauty to a culture aching for it. It was an artistic ray of hope for a world teetering on the front edge of what would turn out to be twenty-three-years-and-counting of constant war and tumult.

Peter Jackson, the veteran director of Kiwi splatter films, looked like an unlikely man to helm such a project at the time, but he acquitted himself admirably by bringing his scrappy, can-do attitude to the construction of what is arguably the most completely realized fictional world ever to see the printed page (let alone the lens of an Arriflex).

Jackson had the good sense to hire John Howe and Alan Lee to design the production, and to bias much of the visualFX work towards enormous miniatures. These miniatures turned out to be so good that much of the digital work in the series now sticks out like a sore thumb. When I watched it on opening weekend, when Gandalf’s staff brightened to show the grandeur of the Dwarrowdelf in Moria, the theater erupted in gasps, applause, and tears of awe.

The technical mastery on display was so effective that it mostly concealed the fact that Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings ripped the heart out of Tolkien’s books and curb-stomped it in such spectacular fashion that it helped pervert the moral sense of the planet in ways we’re still dealing with.

The Hearts of Men are Easily Corrupted

Compressing a sweeping thousand-page book into a comparatively modest nine-hour run time will, of course, involve compromises. Anyone familiar with the books would expect elements that don’t make sense on first reading, or that are incidental to the story-as-told, to be cut entirely. Tolkien’s books contain no shortage of such material, from long deep-lore passages to the apparently dead-end subplot of nature-spirit Tom Bombadil, to Saruman’s manipulation of Radagast, to the twisted competition between Ugluk and Grishnak for the attention of Merry and Pippin, and so on.

When your source material is a book whose background material literally fills an entire shelf, cuts will—and should—be made for the big screen. Trimming and consolidating plot elements is essential to the adaptation process, and isn’t (in my view) a valid polemical target.

A fundamental failure to understand the source material is another matter. At its core, Tolkien’s corpus is a story of common people caught up in earth-shaking events. Jackson’s story is somewhat different, and it’s there almost from the first frame of the film. The prologue to the film tells of the forging of the Rings of Power, a tale Tolkien tells in a simple poem that serves as the book’s epigraph, and is quoted a few times as the story unfolds:

Three rings for the Elven kings under the sky,
Seven for the Dwarf lords in their halls of stone,
Nine rings for mortal men, doomed to die
One ring for the Dark Lord on his dark throne in the land of Mordor where the shadows lie.
One ring to rule them all,
One ring to find them,
One ring to bring them all, and in the darkness bind them
In the land of Mordor where the shadows lie.

This same material is covered in the The Fellowship of the Ring (film) with voice over narration that begins:

It began with the forging of the Great Rings.
Three were given to the Elves, immortal. Wisest and fairest of all beings.
Seven to the Dwarf-lords; great miners and craftsmen of the mountain-halls.
And nine. Nine rings were gifted to the race of men, who above all desire power. [emphasis in original]
For within these rings were bound the strength and will to govern each race.

Let us leave aside geeky considerations, such as the fact that the Rings of Power were not made for governing things and were rarely used thus. Instead, look above at the differences between these two brief monologues in the characterization of the races in question.

Tolkien characterizes Elves as being lofty, especially when contrasted with the Dwarves—but nowhere does he imply that this loftiness implies wisdom. Indeed, his Elves are repeatedly and rather staggeringly foolish and self-absorbed, seeing themselves as removed from petty mortal affairs to the point where only a very few will even bother getting involved in the War of the Ring. Instead, when things get too hot for them, they flee across the sea to Valinor, like cowards.

Moving along to Men, notice how, from their first mention, they are portrayed by Jackson as dark, power-hungry creatures whose hearts are “easily corrupted.”¹

Now glance again at Tolkien’s view. In his epigraph, the most important, defining characteristic of Men is that they are mortal. This is important through the series, as it is the relationship of Men with death that forms the root of both men’s derangement (Boromir, Denethor, Theoden, and the Nine Nazgul) and their greatest moments of heroism and nobility (Theoden, Theodred, Faramir, Éowyn, Boromir, and Aragorn). Death is what the Elves call the “Gift of Men,” because Men—limited by death—experience neither the apathy and desolation that comes from growing weary of the world, nor the fear and paralysis that comes from having memories so long that they remember hundreds and thousands of years of personal missteps.

This change, coming in the first minute of the film, gives away the game. We are about to witness a Manichean morality play, where the Elves are pure, the Men are weak and grasping, and the Dark Lord is the apotheosis of Man’s most important feature: his desire for power.

And to guide us through this tale, we shall need a hero, or group of heroes, that can calibrate our moral compass so that we, the audience, can make sense of the strange world we’re about to fall into.

Hobbits as Canaries

Book Frodo didn’t need Sam to keep him from swooning like a fainting socialite in this scene

If you’ve only ever seen Jackon’s version of The Lord of the Rings, your picture of Hobbits is romantic and pastoral. These are people of the land, naïve, innocent of all evil in the world, who have an elfin and childlike quality that gives them the wisdom to be sharp outsider conscience-avatars,² selfless and helpless do-gooders swept up by events,³ preternaturally canny puzzle-solvers,⁴ and ideal sin-eaters.⁵ You might even get the idea that Hobbits are basically only capable of evil due to the corruption of outside forces such as the One Ring—after all, Sméagol and Frodo and Bilbo were all turned into mad-raving, sometimes murderous, and often pathetic addicts in its presence.

Hobbits are capable of rough-n-tumble play, the occasional booze up, and certainly have a great deal of heart and endurance, but to imagine that they would be wise like the Elves, or canny warriors with an ability to call on the deep magic of the world, or weak-willed like Men? Unthinkable. They are too innocent, too sweet-natured to know such things. They are what good people should be. Harmless as doves. Helpless as children. Selfless enough to walk into Mordor without any ulterior motive or hope of reward.

But, despite their short stature, these strange ethereal child-creatures of the silver screen have less in common with their page-born progenitors than does a war stallion with the rocking horse that lived in the corner of my childhood bedroom. In Tolkien’s books, you see, not a single one of the above mentioned character dynamics ever appear (ditto for the events I’ve listed in the footnotes).

Tolkien’s Hobbits are tough customers, not fools. Far from being children, even the most naïve among them have been around their local block a few times. There are seven which concern us: Bilbo, Frodo, Samwise, Merry, Pippin, Farmer Maggot, and Sméagol.

Bilbo

The Hobbit that started it all (narratively speaking), Bilbo—who was hired as a thief—was canny enough to outfox a dragon, escape a cannibalistic Hobbit (Gollum) through guile, outwit both the spiders and the Elves of Mirkwood (again, largely through guile), turn the tide of an international war by brokering secret back-room deals, and win the respect of Dwarf-king Thorin Oakenshield before having to return home and face the worst plague in Middle-Earth: relatives who want to steal his stuff. And he did all of this at the tender age of fifty.

Bilbo might not have wanted to go on his adventure, might have fretted about its propriety and whether he should have brought more handkerchiefs, and might have wished again and again to be back home in a world he understood, but once thrust into the thick of it he acquitted himself well because he was more pragmatic—willing to use underhanded tactics in service of greater goals like survival, diplomacy, and victory—than were his more forthright and stiff-necked Dwarf companions.

Bilbo’s ethical flexibility in these respects, coupled with his well-ordered moral universe, was reasonably characterized by Bilbo’s frenemy Thorin Oakenshield as wisdom:

Child of the kindly West, I have come to know, if more of us valued your ways—food and cheer above hoarded gold—it would be a merrier world.

It is also worth pointing out that Bilbo is one of only three creatures in the history of Middle Earth to voluntarily surrender the One Ring after it had entered his possession—something done not out of innocence, but out of recognizing the unhealthiness of his attachment to it, and the wisdom of Gandalf’s suggestion that he give it to Frodo. When he again sees the Ring in Rivendelll, he is overwhelmed with his desire for it, yet he still quietly bids Frodo to “Put it away,” and finds himself ashamed to know what a terrible burden he has bequeathed his nephew. Then, later that same week, he attempts to claim the role of Ring bearer at the Council of Elrond—not only will it be another great adventure, but it will reunite him with his precious Ring.

Tolkien’s Bilbo is not the adorably doddering old fool of the films. He does not suddenly flash into Gollum-like grasping at the sight of the Ring. He is not such a pathetic child as to go, in tears, into Gandalf’s arms for a comforting hug when Gandalf shows his power. Why would he? This Bilbo is a creature with more than a century under his belt, who has faced down trolls and orcs and goblins and dragons and cannibal Hobbits. He understands the gravity of his situation: he has himself been corrupted by his long association with the Ring’s power, and he is able to make his heroic decision to leave the Ring behind because, frankly, he is not the infantile pipsqueak portrayed in the films.

Frodo

Frodo, Bilbo’s nephew, was thirty-three when he took up the burden of the Ring, but fifty when he set out from Hobbiton for Rivendelll to deliver it to Elrond. Upon learning its nature, it became clear to him that, to protect his home, he must deliver the Ring to those of greater wisdom than he—and since Gandalf would not take it, he had to make do on his own.

After leaving the Shire he fights the Barrow-Wights (and loses), engages the Lord of the Nazgul in single combat (and loses), rides to the Ford of Rivendell alone and dying yet still summons the strength to defy all of the nine Black Riders by himself despite them using his connection to the Ring against him. After he recovers in Rivendell and is free of his obligation, he nonetheless volunteers to take the Ring to Mordor, in no small part because it will give him an excuse to possess it a little longer—and this only a few days after he discovered, to his own horror, that he was willing to beat (or kill) Bilbo in order to prevent Bilbo from once again laying hands on the precious thing.

Over Carhadras, in Moria, in Lothlorien, and at the Falls of Rauros he, again and again, displays tenacity, determination, and a capacity for violence. He struggles with his own dark impulses, but does not hesitate to use the Ring when it suits him.

And Frodo does understand that the power of the Ring is useful for more than just hiding from orcs; he uses it cynically to enslave Sméagol. Then, on the slopes of Mount Doom, Frodo wraps his hand around the Ring and calls upon its magic, becoming visibly transfigured and cursing Gollum with the power of the Ring.

Then suddenly, as before under the eaves of the Emyn Muil, Sam saw these two rivals with other vision. A crouching shape, scarcely more than the shadow of a living thing, a creature now wholly ruined and defeated, yet filled with a hideous lust and rage; and before it stood stern, untouchable now by pity, a figure robed in white, but at its breast it held a wheel of fire. Out of the fire there spoke a commanding voice.
‘Begone, and trouble me no more! If you touch me ever again, you shall be cast yourself into the Fire of Doom.’
The crouching shape backed away, terror in its blinking eyes, and yet at the same time insatiable desire. Then the vision passed and Sam saw Frodo standing, hand on breast, his breath coming in great gasps, and Gollum at his feet, resting on his knees with his wide-splayed hands upon the ground.

—The Return of the King

And when finally Frodo claims the Ring for his own and puts it on, he does so not out of the weakness of a grasping child, but because even a firmly-grounded, stout-hearted Hobbit is not grounded enough to resist its temptation all on his own.⁶ Mere miles from Sauron’s seat of power, Frodo slips the Ring on his finger with full intent to wield its power against any who might threaten his mastery of the Ring.

As a hero, Frodo took on a terrible burden with the full knowledge that doing so would take him through fire and death, and without hope of return. He didn’t do it because he was innocent of evil or violence, or due to a wide-eyed desire to do the right thing. He certainly didn’t do it to stop a brawl from breaking out over the table at the Council of Elrond. He did it because he understood the gravity of the undertaking, because Bilbo’s long tenure with the Ring proved that Hobbits could carry it for a long time without being ruined, and because he didn’t want to be parted with it so soon.

Samwise

Sam is a gardener in his mid-thirties, and relatively young by Hobbit standards. His name, Samwise, literally means “half-wit.” He’s a lower class laborer who doesn’t get a lot of respect from respectable Hobbits—even Gandalf initially takes his name at face value, considering him too dim to be trusted with a secret.

It is only when Frodo attempts to leave the Shire that we learn that Sam—in concert with Merry and Pippin—had figured out that something sinister was afoot, and it had something to do with Bilbo’s old ring. Gandalf only catches him eavesdropping because Sam and Merry and Pippin were conspiring together to make sure that Frodo could not slip out of the Shire alone and into danger as Bilbo had done; he’d been stalking Frodo to find out what was going on.

Over the course of his adventures, Sam proves not to be just a loyal servant to the upper-class Frodo, but a stalwart friend, a capable warrior, and a man of immense discernment and subtlety, as revealed in his interactions with Faramir in the cavern behind the waterfall in The Two Towers (book).

He is courageous and sensible, well-grounded and practical, and not prone to childish petulance, outbursts of emotion, or wallowing in self-pity (as his filmic counterpart is). When Frodo is apparently killed by Shelob, Sam takes the Ring and continues the quest on his own. Facing Mount Doom with the Ring about his neck, he sees laid before him the great power at his fingertips:

Wild fantasies arose in his mind; and he saw Samwise the Strong, Hero of the Age, striding with a flaming sword across the darkened land, and armies flocking to his call as he marched to the overthrow of Barad-dûr. And then all the clouds rolled away, and the white sun shone, and at his command the vale of Gorgoroth became a garden of flowers and trees and brought forth fruit. He had only to put on the Ring and claim it for his own, and all this could be.

—The Return of the King

A temptation tailored to the tastes of a gardener, and yet it is because of his “plain Hobbit-sense” that he lets the temptation wash over him and determines to bear the burden to the end and destroy the Ring. Later, he chances upon some Orcs and overhears that Frodo is alive and in the tower of Cirith Ungol, and steals in to save his master and friend, whereupon, moved by love and loyalty, he—like only two other creatures in the entire history of Middle-Earth—voluntarily surrenders the One Ring.

Merry and Pippin

Merry and Pippin, like Sam, are younger than Frodo. The three are Frodo’s hangers-on, and make up the core of his social circle.

They mastermind a conspiracy against Frodo and waylay him as he flees the Shire, secreting him out by an unexpected road under the nose of the Black Riders. Less savvy than Frodo and less wise than Sam at the beginning, they nevertheless display great caution and canniness dealing with the humans in Bree. There it is Frodo’s decision to dance for the entertainment of the crowd, implicitly prompted by the Ring’s desire for discovery, that gives them away at the Prancing Pony—not Pippin’s loose-lipped drunken bragging (as in the films).

Merry and Pippin and Sam gladly accept the appointment to the Fellowship as back-up Ring bearers—the four Hobbits initially form the canon fodder of the group, being the only creatures considered tough and unambitious enough to long survive the temptations and corruptions of the Ring.

Pippin, prone to a fascination with dark things, drops a stone into a well in Moria, giving away the Fellowship’s position to the Orcs in the levels below. This propensity shows up again with his fascination with the palantír hurled out of Orthanc by Wormtongue.

However, this fascination serves him well, allowing him to keep his head while drugged and beaten while held captive by the Uruk-Hai. As those orcs take him back to Orthanc, he drops his elvish brooch so that Aragorn will know he and Merry are alive. He studies the group dynamics of the orc troupe, and uses his insight to stoke the conflict between Ugluk and Grishnak, which leads ultimately to the Hobbits’ escape into Fangorn Forest.

Merry, on the other hand, is the planner of the pair. He was the architect of the conspiracy to protect Frodo, marshaling community resources, enlisting Farmer Maggot to help source provisions, carts, and ponies. It is his foresight and deliberation that is responsible for smuggling Frodo safely out of the Shire despite his steps being dogged by the Black Riders.

Merry spends time studying the forms and formalities of the civilizations he encounters. His wait-and-see approach is chiefly responsible for the alliance with Treebeard (who, by the way, was never such an idiot that he didn’t know his own forest was being harvested by Saruman until the Hobbits tricked him into walking into a clear-cut, but that’s a whole other section that would make this article far too long), and thus Merry is also the architect of the fall of Saruman.

When Merry finds his fate wedded to the Rohirrim he determines to join their army and climb their ranks, only to find himself sidelined because Theoden sees him—due to his small stature—as a child in need of protection.

Refusing to comply, he stows away with a squire who also is not content to be sidelined, and the two of them ride with the army to Gondor—only to discover there, in the heat of battle, that his squire-friend is the king’s niece Éowyn. As she protects her uncle Theoden from the Lord of the Nazgul, Merry strikes the decisive blow when he stabs the wraith in the back, giving Éowyn the opportunity to behead it, ending its reign of terror.

Farmer Maggot

A small side-character in the early pages of The Fellowship of the Ring, Farmer Maggot was a key player in Merry’s conspiracy. The owner of a farm in the northeast borderlands of the Shire, he had a reputation among Hobbits as being a grouchy old son-of-a-bitch and was none-too-kind to young Hobbits who nipped into his fields for a quick snack.

He was also the first Hobbit to face down the Nazgul. When he caught a Black Rider on his land, unimpressed with both an offer of gold and with dark threats if he didn’t help the Nazgul find Frodo, Farmer Maggot threatened to set his attack dogs on the Rider and successfully scared him off.

In the film, on the other hand, Maggot points the Riders towards Hobbiton in order to escape their attention.

Sméagol

The last of our Hobbits, Sméagol (who would eventually be known as Gollum) is the Stoor Hobbit who murdered his best friend and stole the One Ring, then successfully kept it for a thousand years. By the time he enters the story he is a pitiable creature, twisted with age, his mind ruined by centuries of isolation with the Ring as his only companion. He speaks to the Ring, and it speaks to him, and he speaks to himself, giving him the appearance of having a split personality.

But unlike what we see in the films, he is not a junkie trying to get his next fix by getting the Ring back for himself, he is a creature entirely dominated by envy and greed (very much a look at what the treasure-hunting Bilbo might have become had he not valued “food and cheer above hoarded gold”). He is cunning, calculating, with an emptiness and need at his center that far predates his possession of the Ring—the Ring simply found in him an apt steward, giving him the latitude to develop his already murderous, thieving, desperately avaricious nature.

Tolkien’s Hobbits, as you can see, are tough little bastards with every inch the range of characterization and sophistication as real-world humans. This is important because, as we will see, Jackson’s misunderstanding the Hobbits is the key to the derangement contained within, and wrought by, his film series.

The World of Men

The Lord of the Rings follows the Hobbits in their journey through the world of Men, and in Tolkien’s book there are eight Men who give us the Measure of Man, so to speak: Wormtongue, Theoden, Éowyn, Éomer, Aragorn, Faramir, Boromir, and Denethor. Four of these are important to our current exercise.

Aragorn

Also known as Strider, Aragorn enters the story by chance. He has been conspiring with Gandalf for several decades now, and is searching for Gandalf (who is several months late for a meeting) near Bree. While watching the road he happens to overhear the Hobbits working out their cover story before entering town, and recognizes the name “Baggins.” It’s a name he’s well familiar with; it was his conspiracy with Gandalf that originally set the Dwarves and Bilbo on the quest to battle Smaug for the treasure of the Lonely Mountain several decades earlier—one of his first serious strategic decisions as King, a rank he holds by birthright.

Aragorn is King of the Dúnedain (also known as The Rangers, the remnants of the noble houses of the Kingdom of Arnor). He knew that, in order to successfully claim the throne of Gondor, he would have to defeat Sauron. Removing the dragon from the Lonely Mountain was essential to that plan—if the dragon were at Sauron’s disposal, there would be no hope of even mustering an army (let alone mobilizing one), as the dragon could burn the fields and starve the kingdoms of Men into submission.

Aragorn also knows the name “Baggins” because it was he who helped Gandalf hunt down Gollum and get from him the story of how the wretch found the Ring, and how Sauron had learned the name “Baggins” when Gollum strayed into Mordor. He knows the Nine are abroad searching for the Shire and a Hobbit named Baggins.

Since Gandalf has failed to appear, Aragorn offers the Hobbits his aid. He guides them and guards them on the road to Rivendell. His knowledge of history helps bring the Hobbits up to speed with the world they live in, while his knowledge of strategy and of the healing arts allow them to mostly avoid the Nazgul while keeping Frodo alive despite the shard of a Morgul blade working its way inward toward the hobbit’s heart. Aragorn’s alliance with the Elves allows him to prevail upon Glorfindel to lend Frodo a horse, and that is the horse that bears Frodo across the Ford and under the umbrella of Elrond’s protection.

After the Council of Elrond, Aragorn becomes convinced that his decades of work building alliances and knocking out Sauron’s support structures have made the time ripe, and he re-forges the Blade that was Broken and accompanies the Fellowship—not to go to Mordor, but to travel with them until he himself peels off to Gondor to reclaim his throne.

At Helm’s Deep, it is Aragorn’s personal army—the Dúnedain (and not a troupe of Elrond’s Elven archers)—that reinforces Theoden’s troops to hold the Deep while Gandalf rounds up the Rohirrim.

After the battle, Aragorn receives word that some of his prospective subjects—citizens of Gondor south of the mountains—are under assault from Sauron’s allies. With Denethor’s forces pinned down at Minas Tirith, there is no one to defend their cities and villages. Aragorn decides that, as King, he must defend his subjects before he worries about saving his capitol. Using the palantír he bluffs Sauron into bending all the forces of Mordor to the assault on Mina Tirith, opening an opportunity for Aragorn to lead the Dúnedain through the Paths of the Dead, where he calls upon the ghosts of Dunharrow to reinforce the Dúnedain in their war against Sauron’s forces in the south.

In his whole arc, Aragorn’s most trying moments come after the loss of Gandalf—due to Gandalf’s failure to tell Aragorn his plan for the Fellowship—and after the loss of Merry and Pippin to Fangorn. In these moments, we see his strength and determination in the face of failure and uncertainty. He brings to all his endeavors the steady hand of experience and command. By no means perfect, he is also by no means weak or rash. He is a man who has enough patience and wisdom to play a chess game against Sauron for over six decades, starting in his youth, and see it through to conclusion.

Unlike in the films, Tolkien’s Aragorn is not worried about his self-worth. He is not weighed down or motivated by personal feelings of guilt and family shame. His goal is to restore his family’s honor by restoring the monarchy in Gondor, and to protect his people and his friends even at the expense of his own life, or his throne.

Denethor

The proud head of a noble house that has ruled Gondor in the absence of a legitimate king, Denethor is the heir to a thousand-year debt of honor. His two sons, both of whom he loves dearly, believe with him that the honor of their house depends on its willingness to surrender its office when and if an heir of Isildur were to show up and claim the throne (though Boromir grated at it until he was convinced of Aragorn’s worth, not just his claim). Denethor is a well-educated man who rules the capitol of the greatest surviving human civilization in Middle Earth, and as the Shadow begins massing in the east he casts about for anything that can help.

He finds that help in the dusty archives beneath the city: A palantír—a crystal ball that will let him gaze over the Mountains of Shadow and see what Sauron is up to.

Unbeknownst to him Sauron has a palantír of his own, captured from Minas Ithil long ago, and with it the Dark Lord can control the gaze of the other palantíri. Over the course of a couple years, Sauron—in a move worthy of today’s eyeball-hungry media—showed Denethor a carefully edited version of reality which unwound his mind.

Learning of the death of Boromir, then hearing from Faramir that the Ring went into Mordor, he is convinced that all is lost. Nonetheless, he hangs on out of a sense of duty. He is, however, deeply hurt by Faramir having paid more attention to Gandalf’s mentorship (evidenced in letting Frodo and the Ring go) than he did to his duty to and love for his father and his people. Denethor considers this a personal betrayal, and feels as if he has lost his second son, as well. He sends Faramir to Osgiliath to reinforce the garrison there.

When Faramir is carried back from Osgiliath on a litter, Denethor at last loses all hope. He announces to Gandalf that he has seen the future fall of Minas Tirith, and that with the Ring gone to Mordor there is nothing anyone can do to hold the line against the darkness—especially not a Ranger from the North who knows nothing of commanding proper armies or defending cities.

Since Gandalf’s scheme necessitates giving Denethor’s throne to an unworthy successor, since Denethor can’t hand the city over to the new King in good condition, and since against the dark power rising in Mordor there is no victory, Denethor will rule his own end. He and his son will, as did the kings of old, end their own lives in fire, and with honor. He orders Faramir brought to the crypt, builds himself a pyre, climbs on, and lights it himself. It is only Gandalf’s skillful rhetoric that convinces the guard not to put Faramir on the pyre as well.

Boromir

Oldest son of Denethor and heir to the Stewardship of Gondor, Boromir shows up at the Council of Elrond in response to a vision his brother experienced.

Upon learning of the existence of the Ring, he immediately argues for taking it to Minas Tirith and using it to defeat the armies of Sauron. Elrond and Gandalf both rebuke him, and he accepts it, but the idea persists. As the Fellowhsip journeys south, he occasionally advocates for going first to Minas Tirith before Mordor, in hopes that having the Ring there will give the Men of Gondor a nuclear option in opposing the armies of Mordor.

While Boromir is initially skeptical of Aragorn’s worthiness of the throne, the two men become fast friends over the course of the Fellowship. When finally the company comes to the Falls of Rauros and must choose which direction to go, Boromir finds Frodo considering which road to take, and advocates for his preferred plan of taking the Ring to Minas Tirith. When Frodo refuses, Boromir attacks him and attempts to seize the Ring for himself. After Frodo escapes, Boromir realizes what he’s done, and goes to Aragorn to confess his sins. Before they can mount a search for Frodo, the Uruk-Hai fall upon them. Boromir dies attempting to defend Merry and Pippin from the orcs.

Faramir

Denethor’s youngest son, Faramir, was, in his youth, an eager pupil of Gandalf’s. A capable general, he is more sedate and contemplative than his brother or father. He is the chief of the armies east of Anduin, keeping watch upon the Morgul Vale for signs of troop mobilization and doing what he can to interdict Sauron’s allies en route to their muster points.

He stumbles upon Frodo and Sam in the foothills of the Mountains of Shadow. They declare themselves as travelers and friends of Gondor. Despite his doubts, he lets them go; a battle is imminent and he can’t have his men’s attention divided. After the battle he tracks the Hobbits down and takes them to his secret headquarters, where he—very politely and with an easy manner—interrogates them.

He guesses, before they tell him, that they bear the Ring, but he decides quickly that seizing it for himself or for his father would be a terrible mistake, and agrees that it should be destroyed. He enlists Frodo’s help in capturing Gollum—a move which unintentionally breaks the trust between Gollum and Frodo—and interrogates the creature before letting them all go. At their parting, he warns Frodo not to trust Gollum, because Gollum is leading them up a road that has some great terror upon it, and Gollum may be intending to betray the hobbits.

Faramir then returns to Gondor to report on these events and also that the garrison at Osgiliath has just barely hung on against the last wave of attacks from the forces of Mordor.

Denethor, despairing at his son’s foolish decision not to seize the Ring, sends him back out to reinforce Osgiliath.

Faramir is grievously wounded in the ensuing battle, and is only brought out of his coma by Aragorn. He awakes to a world where his father is dead, his family’s stewardship is ended, and the world itself seems to be dying around him. He bonds with Éowyn in the Houses of Healing, and the two eventually marry. Aragorn crowns Faramir Prince of Ithilien, and tasks him with reclaiming Osgiliath and Minas Ithil and the related lands from their ruin at the hands of Sauron.

The Weakness of Men

In Tolkien’s world, the line between good and evil runs through the hearts of Men. With the exception of Wormtongue, there isn’t a single one in the whole series that can be easily reduced to a cartoon (not even Boromir, who is often chiefly remembered for his betrayal of Frodo). Nor are any of them weak or petty. Their flaws—Denethor’s despair, Boromir’s desire—are heroic flaws; exactly the sorts of flaws one would expect of Great Men pushed to the limits of their endurance. Tragic, with a capital “T.”

Jackson’s Men are...different. Whether seen through the eyes of Galadriel’s opening monologue (“The hearts of Men are easily corrupted” “...above all else [Men] desire power”) or the eyes of Elrond (“Men are weak”), the films are not shy about their opinion about the true nature of humans: The strong are evil. Only the weak might be good. The film conveniently presents us with two pairings of such characters to underscore the point.

Denethor and Boromir both enter the films as men of great power—Denethor’s power is political, Boromir’s is physical—and they are immediately revealed as untrustworthy. Jackson’s Boromir reacts petulantly to the existence of Aragorn, grumbling that “Gondor needs no King,” and the two men are shown to have a strained relationship all through, rooted clearly in Boromir’s conviction that Aragorn’s claim to the throne is illegitimate. Only in the moments of his death does he recognize Aragorn’s claim. Instead of a noble man who succumbs to temptation, Jackson’s Boromir is a vainglorious and power-hungry (if charming) braggart who eventually redeems himself by protecting those weaker than he.

Jackson’s Denethor is a nasty, one-dimensional character. From his first appearance (in the Extended Editions) in Osgiliath, he is shown as casually cruel towards his younger son, and capricious to the point where the notion that he governs a prosperous city beggars belief. As the story continues, he’s shown to be paranoid and erratic, consumed by his hatred for Faramir’s weakness, and convinced that he is surrounded by conspirators intent upon deposing him.

On the other side, the film’s “good” Men are, frankly, useless.

Faramir is shown quickly as angsty and weak, so starved for his father’s love that he can not bring himself to take responsibility for deciding Frodo’s fate. He engages neither with the morality of the situation nor the strategic opportunities involved—he’s been ordered to take spies to his father, and goddammit he will do so come hell or high water. Only when he literally see the Lord of the Nazgul flying within feet of Frodo in Osgiliath does he change his mind (for reasons which remain unclear even in the extended editions of the films). His victimization at the hands of his abusive father makes him sympathetic, and lends emotional weight to his grudging (and long overdue) choices to do the right thing in the stupidest possible fashion.

Aragorn is the Great Man of the films. We know he is good because he doubts himself. He isn’t king because he does not want to rule. He is afraid that he is tainted by the corruption of his ancestor Isildur, and he does not want to go to Gondor or claim his throne. Given his druthers, he’d hang out in Rivendell and make moon-eyes at Arwen.

But go he does, and his extended absence gives his girlfriend the suicidal blues, so his father-in-law-to-be (Elrond, who is already on record saying that Aragorn is too much of a pansy to be worthy either of his daughter or of the throne of Gondor) has to come a thousand and a half miles to bitch-slap him into taking responsibility for his kingdom. Elrond brings an Elf army to help at Helms Deep, because this Aragorn is too good to want the chieftainship of the Dúnedain, so has no army at his command. Elrond also brings the re-forged sword of Isildur, because this Aragorn never wanted it so never carried it himself before this point.

From the moment Aragorn enters the film in Bree, he’s erratic, fatalistic, grumpy, and angsty as hell. His unwillingness to take up his responsibilities prove that he is a worthy hero of deep virtue. He desires no power, and loathes his heritage.

Aragorn’s arc is central to the films—of far more importance than is Frodo’s. His arc occupies the most screen time from The Two Towers forward, and his anguish at his numerous failures of leadership gets multiplied by added false jeopardy, faked-character deaths, dreams of his girlfriend, and a frankly risible attempt to shame Theoden into action: The Man-Who-Wouldn’t-Be-King-If-You-Gave-It-To-Him spends a lot of effort Monday Morning Quarterbacking the man who IS King and trying to save his people, all while whining about Theoden’s reluctance to aid Gondor.

Of Goodness and Innocence

Taken just as an adaptation, while the Jackson films do a fantastic job of conveying the sweep and wonder of their source material, they fail exactly where adaptations most ought to succeed: either in preserving and recapitulating the pith and substance of the original story, or commenting upon it. This kind of failure isn’t all that uncommon—the only thing that ought to make it remarkable is the rather broad distance between the excellence of the technical execution and its poverty as an adaptation.

But Jackson’s films aren’t just any films. They are era-definers. Along with the Harry Potter franchise (books and films), The Lord of the Rings film trilogy marked a renaissance of sorts in Fantasy film and literature. They formed an important part of the moral substrate for Gen Z and the younger Millenials in much the same fashion as did the Star Wars films for Gen X.

The differences in these foundational mythoses show themselves well in the culture twenty years later.

By 1997, the Star Wars generation had reached adulthood, but it was not tamed. It maintained its attachment to the values of individualism, freedom of thought, self-improvement, pouring oneself into a cause, building found families, and doing it all under the nose of an Evil Empire determined to crush its dreams (the Baby Boomer hegemony, which the Xers were too scant to have any hope of breaking). The heroes and villains of that generation measured themselves by the basic moral vision laid out by the adventures of Luke Skywalker, and the stories they told themselves (and told about themselves)—from Fight Club to Clerks to Infinite Jest—reflect it.

Jackson’s films, on the other hand, present a very simple moral vision:
“Innocence is goodness.”

It is the innocence of the Hobbits that makes them the ideal redeemers of the world. Their childish weakness makes them sympathetic. Their perfection on this front makes Frodo’s suffering all the more painful for us, because the distance between that wide-eyed soft-faced child in the opening moments of Fellowship and the grizzled, mud-streaked, Ring-maddened psycho standing inside the volcano is so great. It makes us extra sympathetic to Sam, whose dejection when Frodo tells him to “go home” looks so like what many of us felt in the schoolyard when we got picked last for soccer. “These beautiful souls,” it makes us cry, “should never have to deal with such ugliness! That they do shows us how corrupt this world really is!”

Indeed, the world of the films is so corrupt that the only adults worth rooting for are those who have checked out of the system entirely; not the mavericks who forge new paths as outsiders, but the brooding wannabes who sit on the sidelines wallowing in self-pity and self-doubt. These are the ones the films deem deserving of admiration, because they know what a poison pill power is. Because they care so much about the parents or the charges who care nothing for them that they will do anything to avoid hurting them. Yes, they must grow in order to be the Heroes we know they can be, but that growth can only be brought from the outside—through the stern admonitions of a mentor, or under dire threat from an enemy.

This moral vision is what literary scholar Hugues Lebailly calls “The Cult of the Child.” It is a veneration of that feeling of nostalgia we often get for the days when “everything was simple” and we could take childlike joy in everything.

In Victorian England, this veneration reached a fevered pitch of sacrilization, resulting in the bowdlerization of English literary traditions, a re-jiggering of Christianity around the veneration of the Baby Jesus rather than the Savior Jesus, and—this should be unsurprising given the close link between spirituality and sexuality that shows itself in all cultures—the eroticization of childhood. The venerated child is always given the physical and emotional traits that appeal simultaneously to the care-taking drives and the sexual appetites (seen very well in Jackson’s wide-eyed Frodo and in Harry Potter’s precocious wisdom and boundless enthusiasm).

This conflation of desires on the part of the audience places the sacred child in a position of moral authority:

One listens to the voice of innocence because it sounds very like the voice of conscience.

One listens to the objects of one’s erotic desire because awe is often a key ingredient of erotic fascination (remember how, when you were a teenager, you’d hang upon your intended’s every word on topics you’d otherwise have found boring?).

This kind of fetishism (I use the word deliberately, as a “fetish” is literally an object of worship) wasn’t new even in Victorian England. It shows up all through Christian history, perhaps most egregiously in the tales of Children’s Crusade in the 13^th century, where children were allegedly exhorted to join a quest to reclaim Jerusalem from the Muslims on the grounds that God would protect them due to their innocence (it’s unclear to me if this happened as one event, or is a conflation of many smaller such events and campaigns that bled together in historical memory).

Equating innocence with weakness and childish ignorance with virtue, by necessity, turns strength into evidence of sin. This is a parody of Children’s Church morality, less nuanced even than an old Disney film. And when this kind of thinking gets out of control, it deranges a culture. Let’s leave aside the growing push for the normalization of pedophilia (which is certainly aided by the strong cultural presence of the Cult of the Child), and look just at the less salacious danger that such thinking poses.

This moral vision elevates an impracticable and undesirable (by and for adults) aspect of childhood to a moral ideal. Any time one’s moral paradigm is impracticable, one is easily excused for not practicing it. Any time it’s undesirable, one casts about for paragons in whom it is desirable. We find such paragons in child-heroes such as Jackson’s Frodo, and Harry Potter, and Bella Swan, whose heroism comes not because they grow out of weakness and ignorance and stupidity, but because of their weakness, ignorance, and stupidity.

In the real world, we have a rotating cast of complimentary figures exemplified recently by the likes of Greta Thungberg and David Hogg.

Such heroes are pliable. They have no agency—they do not even choose their adventures. They are, instead, chosen. They are thus easily maneuvered into serving the interests of the powerful, and—while still too young to see it for the poison it is—develop an addiction to the admiration they receive as puppets. They become the sin-eaters and sooth-sayers of our public discourse, excusing the public’s apathy by self-righteously embodying its hope and its rage.

Such lack of agency is these characters’ central virtue. If they were real people, they would not be fit for purpose. In the 21^st century, we prefer our heroes to be empty vessels onto whom we can project our own fantasies. If they had their own natures, their own rough edges, their own desires...well, then they wouldn’t be much use to us.

And hey, if the child can’t handle the fact that we no longer find them fascinating or respectable when they become adults, and if cutting off the public approbation opens inside them a yawning pit of need that drives them to self-destructive (or others-destructive) behavior, who cares? They’re not children—they’re no more special than you or me. What’s a culture without a little child sacrifice here and there, after all?

The Cruel Ironies

Perhaps the cruelest irony of Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings is this:
Tolkien hated the Cult of the Child. One of the reasons he wrote The Hobbit, and later The Lord of the Rings and all its supporting material, was that he wanted his children to have stories with moral and cultural heft,⁷ and he wanted his countrymen to have a mythology that would strengthen and deepen English culture. He believed that books for children should encourage growth, not provide safe entertainment. This is why his stories are filled with moral grays, with tragedy and paradox, and, over and over, with courage and agency.

The world is indeed full of peril, and in it there are many dark places; but still there is much that is fair, and though in all lands love is now mingled with grief, it grows perhaps the greater.

—The Fellowship of the Ring

The approach taken towards characterization by Jackson et.al. utterly destroyed everything below plot-level that made the story work.

More ironic still, George Lucas was making his Star Wars pequel trilogy at the same time that Jackson was making Rings, and the anti-hero of that story was a wide-eyed innocent boy who wanted only good things, who displayed the same kind of erratic emotionalism and childish certainty as Jackson’s Frodo, but whose “goodness” was the very reason that, in the end, Anakin Skywalker became Darth Vader.

Tolkien knew that such “goodness” is the seed of evil. His Frodo is no fainting-couch Victorian damsel. He’s a man, and a tough bastard at that. Where Jackson’s Frodo requires rescue after rescue like some Middle-Earth version of Princess Peach, Tolkien’s Frodo is the prime mover in his own story. He would never have been so whiny and weak as to let Gollum manipulate him into sending Sam back to the Shire on the Stairs of Cirith Ungol, nor so stupid as to go into Shelob's Lair alone, nor so hapless as to run away when Gollum attacked him on Mount Doom instead of calling on the Ring’s power to win the fight, nor so unbelievably foolish as to fight Gollum for the Ring after Gollum took it.

Frodo was beaten, tortured, captured, starved, reduced to a walking skeleton, and the only reason he faltered at the end was because the Ring was not only so powerful that no Middle-Earthly creature could successfully resist it under such circumstances, but because the Ring itself, which had been the source of his pain, was also the only source of strength, meaning, and power in his life (that he was aware of). The moment it was removed from him, he remembered his more solid source of strength—his friendship with Sam—and didn't pursue the Ring.

This is the Frodo Tolkien gave us. Our world is falling apart at the seams in no small part because our vision of character-strength is inverted from what Tolkien’s was. In an environment characterized by cowardice, emotionalism, and self-importance, we could use a few Frodos in common circulation...so long as they’re Tolkien’s Frodo. We should have had him with us the last two decades, but, alas, Jackson stole him from us.

We now inhabit a world characterized by Jackson’s Child Cult vision, where victimization is a virtue, weakness is a sign of wisdom, and self-obsession a sign of integrity. And it’s a damn shame. Because so long as this vision prevails, then—as Mel Brooks observed—Evil will always triumph, because Good is dumb.

1. This bias carries through to the characterization of literally every man (though not every woman) in the films. But we’ll get to that.

2. As Merry and Pippin were with Treebeard in The Two Towers (film), and as Pippin was with Denethor in The Return of the King (film).

3. As Sam was to Frodo, and as Frodo was pretty much all the time.

4. As Frodo was at the gates of Moria.

5. Think here of Frodo was as the Ring bearer.

6. The Letters of JRR Tolkien, 191-192

7. This is not to say there’s nothing to criticize in Tolkien’s moral vision, but that essay won’t be done for another few weeks.