The Fiat of Ilúvatar's Children During the War of the Ring

I offer You, Lord, . . . my sufferings:

to be endured for Your greater glory.

I want to do what You ask of me:

in the way You ask,

for as long as You ask,

because You ask it.

I pray, Lord, that You enlighten my mind,

inflame my will,

purify my heart,

and sanctify my soul. (Pope Clement XI)

Teach us, good Lord,

to serve You as You deserve,

to give and not to count the cost,

to fight and not to heed the wounds,

to toil and not to seek for rest,

to labor and not to ask for any reward,

except that of knowing that I do Your will. (St. Ignatius Loyola)

Even though these words are from millennia after the War of the Ring, those in it could have also spoken them, and they actually did through their actions. The most important battles during this time and the years before were not fought in fields but in souls, especially in those of Bilbo, Frodo, and the others who contended with the temptation to use the Ring. There is much to learn from them about how to conduct our own lives.

Rather than claim the Ring’s power for themselves, the hobbits and other heroes showed the virtue of docility and pliability in the hands of Ilúvatar, “‘that one ever-present Person who is never absent and never named’” (Tolkien, Letters 253). Nothing happened without a reason and somehow advancing the ability to defeat Sauron and destroy the Ring. In fact, many of seeming disasters during the War were actually examples of Ilúvatar’s use of the free will of His children, whether that was for good or for evil, guiding things as they should be. Tolkien wrote, “evil labours with vast power and perpetual success - in vain: preparing always only the soil for unexpected good to sprout in” (76). To name just three ways, there was the fall of Gandalf in Moria, which allowed him to return with greater power as Gandalf the White; the capture of Merry and Pippin, which got them close to Fangorn Forest where they met Treebeard and which led to the destruction of Isengard; and the capture of Frodo and Sam and their forced march with the Orcs, which got the hobbits to Mount Doom in time to save the army of the West from destruction at the Black Gate. After one looks at the whole story, one sees how deeply involved Ilúvatar is in all of this, even though He had not yet revealed Himself as fully as He would later through the Incarnation and Resurrection. Still there were those who were aware, such as Aragorn, Elrond, Gandalf, and Galadriel, who embraced their identities as His children and servants.

Sarah Arthur notes, “Greatness is not about bending others to your will . . . but bending your will toward others. Servanthood is the true test of character, the mark of royalty on those who belong to the King. . . . Servanthood begins with those closest to you” (Walking 145-146). Gandalf, Aragorn, and Sam spent decades in service to others, and they were content and free. As long as Frodo served Ilúvatar, he was unfettered, though he was also bound ever tighter by the cords of the Enemy. Sam freely surrendered his will, heart, and strength to Frodo out of love, and in such heroic service, he also served Ilúvatar. He gave his fiat, his let it be done, in each moment, especially those in which he had a choice to turn away or to follow his master. His actions demonstrated that to try to part him from Frodo would be to attempt to part the Ring-bearer from his shadow or part of his soul. Because Sam said yes to Frodo, and no to his own desires, the Quest was able to succeed.

The more important the task, the more the angels assigned to guard the one charged to fulfil it. “You are not alone,” Aragorn told Frodo on the way to Weathertop (LotR I:11, 185). Frodo had many visible and invisible guardians assigned to protect him. The Valar, Elbereth and Ulmo in particular, watched over him. Gildor, Tom Bombadil, and Faramir all had “chance” encounters with hobbits when they were in peril and would have been devoured if their rescuers had not come.

The Council convened at Rivendell magnified the significance of Frodo’s task. Elrond said that it was “so ordered” (II:2, 236) that those gathered, and no one else, had been “called hither” (II:2, 236) to decide the fate of the Ring and of their world. The travelers who arrived at the Elven haven all thought they were there for a reason other than the one they truly were. Frodo was not there just for Elrond to heal him of a near-mortal wound. Sam, Merry, and Pippin were not there simply out of their love for Frodo. Boromir had not come just to seek an answer to a troubling dream. Gimli thought he had only come with his father to receive advice on how to answer a dark messenger who inquired about a hobbit thief. Legolas thought he was there to report the escape of Gollum. In time, it would be shown that Ilúvatar called all Nine Walkers for the purposes He had set aside for them. “You did not choose me, no, I chose you; and I commissioned you to go out and to bear fruit, fruit that will last” (John 15:16). He filled Frodo with His grace, which was the “elvish beauty” (LotR IV:10, 716) Sam saw. The One nurtured Sam’s love for Frodo over decades, so that it would ever be faithful on their dark road. He placed Merry and Pippin in the Company to allow not only for the salvation of Boromir, but also to save Faramir’s life and to defeat the Witch-king.

It was among the most humble of those gathered that Ilúvatar chose His Ring-bearer. Frodo was a small, mortal vessel with a quaking heart but a strong will and determination, who offered himself “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” (Tolkien, Letters 327). “It was to shame the wise that God chose what is foolish by human reckoning, and to shame what is strong that He chose what is weak by human reckoning; that whom the world thinks common and contemptible are the ones that God has chosen - those who are nothing at all to show up those who are everything” (1 Cor. 1:27-29).

Frodo did not know how to get to where he was meant to go, but he trusted that he would be shown the way. Even as his heart filled with fear and despair, and his body and soul endured the torment of the terrible physical and spiritual weight of the Ring, he continued on. Grace inspired the Ring-bearer and Sam to call upon the aid of Elbereth more than once, and she readily answered their prayers. It is irrelevant that the hobbits did not know how to pray. They still powerfully did so and in languages they did not even know. “The Spirit too comes to help us in our weakness,” St. Paul says. “For when we cannot choose words in order to pray properly, the Spirit Himself expresses our pleas in a way that could never be put into words, and God who knows everything in our hearts knows perfectly well what He means, and that the pleas of the saints expressed by the Spirit are according to the mind of God” (Rom. 8:26). As Sam struggled to decide what to do after Frodo’s apparent death, he had no idea who had put his beloved master forward, but he recognized that Someone had and not Frodo himself. A deep inner voice prompted Sam to take off the Ring during the search for his master in the Tower of Cirith Ungol. The star in Mordor gave the gardener a tangible sign of goodness beyond the reach of evil. He trusted in it enough to know that he was not the only one watching over Frodo. On the strength of this grace-filled sign, he slept deeply and without concern, even though deep in enemy territory. While close to the Fire, he and Frodo both responded to a voice that called them to hurry. Such was the intimate relationship Ilúvatar wove between Himself and His beloved children, so that they responded to Him in the depths of their souls, even without conscious awareness. What makes the hobbits’ trust and faith so beautiful and inspiring is, “Happy are those who have not seen and yet believe” (John 20:29). Ilúvatar looks after His own.

* * *

Verlyn Flieger notes that the hobbits and men in the story “illustrate, with the consequent pain and loss of all that seems most precious, the absolute necessity of letting go, of trusting in the unknown future, of having faith in God” (Question 114). While Frodo and Sam were lost in the Emyn Muil, the younger hobbit wondered if they would ever find a way out. The Ring-bearer was confident that they would. In the depths of his soul, he trusted the One who was leading him to Mordor. The barely concealed mirth Pippin later saw in Gandalf at Minas Tirith was also evidence of deep faith and trust. The wizard knew his Creator was stronger than any foe out in the field.

* * *

Gandalf’s fiat came at great cost. “A man can have no greater love than to lay down his life for his friends” (John 15:13). Richard Purtill says, “Gandalf . . . is a free creature who freely answers the call to imitate Christ. He and Frodo, who walks his own Way of the Cross, are thus closest to Tolkien’s deepest moral ideals” (Myth, Morality 118). Michael Martinez also makes an observation about this time. “And it’s not that Gandalf was weighed in the balance and found wanting, so much, as that he was being asked to make a hard choice. And Gandalf made the correct choice, but in doing so he had to abandon the Valar’s plan. . . . Ilúvatar needed to make some changes. Gandalf therefore went willingly to the sacrifice, as he had been forewarned” (“Count” 439).

The idea that Gandalf “was being asked to make a hard choice” again illustrates free will and surrender. The wizard could have chosen not to accept death by refusing to enter Moria, as Frodo could have chosen not to accept the Ring, but the Maia’s will was so conformed to that of his Creator that he even surrendered his life. Gandalf, Aragorn, and Frodo did not walk the physically and spiritually desolate Roads they did from their own desire but from the embrace of the will of Another. The hope and faith that lay behind this, and which had given birth to the Quest, was trust in Ilúvatar that all would work out if everyone did his own part and that “what should be shall be,” as Galadriel said to Frodo (LotR II:7, 356). Aragorn’s words about Gandalf’s sacrifice also bore this out. “The counsel of Gandalf was not founded on foreknowledge of safety, for himself or for others. . . . There are some things that it is better to begin than to refuse, even though the end may be dark” (III:2, 430). Treebeard and Théoden later used the same wisdom to make their own decisions.

* * *

As Galadriel tested the hearts of the Company, she confronted them with the choice to  turn aside and give into their deepest desires or to continue on their hard road. All of them chose the latter. The temptation to return home tested Sam, but his heart was firmly in his master’s keeping. He would “go home by the long road with Mr. Frodo, or not at all” (II:7, 354).

At the time of her own terrible trial, Galadriel faced the sore temptation to claim the Ring Frodo freely offered her. Rather than surrender to her long-held desire to possess it, she had the strength of will and the grace given to the Firstborn to withstand her trial and shrink back to “a slender elf-woman” (II:7, 356). She recognized that the heights of power the Ring would give her would actually plunge all Middle-earth into the depths. She chose humility instead and to “diminish . . . and remain Galadriel” (II:7, 357).

* * *

The spiritual warfare that is waged inside every soul was.just as evident within Frodo, as he wore the Ring on Amon Hen and felt the Eye and the “fierce eager will . . . [that] leaped towards him” (II:10, 392). Conflict filled the hobbit’s response to this evil presence. “He heard himself crying out: Never, never_ Or was it: Verily I come, I come to you? He could not tell” (II:10, 392). This painfully focused and amplified attack was a demonstration that our greatest enemies are not those we meet on the physical battlefield but the spiritual one. “For it is not against human enemies that we have to struggle, but against the Sovereignties and the Powers who originate the darkness in this world, the spiritual army of evil in the heavens” (Eph. 6:12). Our greatest allies are found there also.

Ilúvatar protected Frodo on the Hill of Sight with angelic aid as He had all along. The hobbit heard a voice command him to take off the Ring, which the crushing power of his Enemy wished to compel him to keep on and so reveal his location. Neither force coerced a decision from him, however. It was the Bearer’s own will, shielded a moment from Sauron and shored up by Gandalf, that decided to remove the Ring at the last possible instant.

Ilúvatar allowed this test to bolster Frodo’s will for the challenges that were ahead, just as in the barrow. After this horrible struggle and the realization that with Boromir’s fall, “the evil of the Ring [was] already at work even in the Company” (LotR II:10, 392), Frodo’s will was able to throw off the shackles of the terror that had previously paralyzed it. Terror and despair still filled him, yet “his heart [was] lighter” (II:10, 392).

While Frodo wrestled with the idea of how to proceed, the Company held their own debate. Sam said Frodo already knew what to do, he was just trying to gather up enough courage to overcome his terror and actually do it. Probably more than anyone, Sam would have wanted his beloved master to be spared, but he did not advocate this at all. He just knew that he needed to be there to help Frodo carry his cross by whatever means he could. Even more than Galadriel’s phial, Sam was Frodo’s “light . . . in dark places” (II:8, 367), a shining, visible beacon of the invisible Love that surrounded them both. Merry and Pippin were all for stopping him, saying it would be “mad and cruel” (II:10, 394) to send Frodo to Mordor. Aragorn pointed out it was not the place of any one of them to decide for Frodo. They would fail if they tried to do so. “There are other powers at work far stronger” (II:10, 394), which was another hint that the man was fully aware of the Powers watching over Frodo.

Joseph Pearce observes the similarities between Frodo and the Cross-bearer to come, while the hobbit walked his via dolorosa, his way of sorrows, poured out as “a holy sacrifice, truly pleasing to God” (Rom. 12:1) and all but crushed by the terrible menace toward which he walked, staggered, and crawled. “The parallels with Christ’s carrying of the Cross are obvious. Furthermore, such is the potency of the prose and the nature of Tolkien’s mysticism that the parable of Frodo’s burden may even lead the reader to a greater understanding of Christ’s burden. All of a sudden one sees that it was not so much the weight of the Cross that caused Christ to stumble, but the weight of evil” (Man and Myth 112).

The crucible of suffering that was the Quest burned everything away in Frodo. Despair increasingly buried the Ring-bearer under a heavy mantle of seemingly certain doom, but he refused to surrender to it. He actively fought his spiritual battle even though he was torn apart by it, unlike Denethor who destroyed himself. Sam wrestled with despair as well and came out victorious. The hobbits’ ordeal stripped down them to naked will and endurance and clothed them in grace. The Enemy chipped away bit by bit at the Frodo’s determination and at his very identity until even his memories were stolen. But as he emptied himself in service and was emptied and filled by the Ring, the shell he became was also a sacred vessel of grace. At the Mountain, Sam beheld a vision of his treasure’s shining soul, shorn of the veils of flesh that surrounded it. After this transfiguration, the gardener saw the Ring-bearer as a spent figure consumed by both Light and Dark and gasping for breath. Both sights were true. Frodo had given everything he possibly could. After he did this, there was no strength left in him to withstand the greatest assault of Sauron upon his heart, will, and soul.

Thankfully, however, “the plan of salvation does not depend on the vulnerable will of the players. The Writer of the Story has the greater will” (Rutledge, Battle 340). Ilúvatar knew the burden would overcome Frodo in the end, that a terribly discordant note would threaten to overwhelm the symphony that had, up to then, absorbed the other miscues that had tried to impose themselves. After the Ring claimed its Bearer at last, and Frodo could no longer say yes to the divine will, it was Ilúvatar Himself who said it for him through the one He had chosen as Ring-destroyer. Frodo had nothing left to give, but he could still receive. Ilúvatar returned to him the same mercy and compassion the hobbit had originally extended to Gollum.

Frodo traveled far in his journeys, not only physically but spiritually. He had indeed “grown very much” (LotR VI:8, 996), as Saruman noted. Hopefully after the Ring-bearer passed West and was able to reflect upon the events in his life and their true meaning, he realized:

The will of God will never take you,

Where the grace of God cannot keep you,

Where the arms of God cannot support you,

Where the riches of God cannot supply your needs,

Where the power of God cannot endow you.

The will of God will never take you,

Where the spirit of God cannot work through you,

Where the wisdom of God cannot teach you,

Where the hands of God cannot mold you.

The will of God will never take you,

Where the love of God cannot enfold you,

Where the mercies of God cannot sustain you,

Where the peace of God cannot calm your fears,

Where the authority of God cannot overrule for you.

The will of God will never take you,

Where the comfort of God cannot dry your tears,

Where the Word of God cannot feed you,

Where the miracles of God cannot be done for you,

Where the omnipresence of God cannot find you. (Author Unknown)

 

 

Works Cited

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Day, Dorothy. Loaves and Fishes. New York: Orbis Books, 1997.

Forbes, Cheryl. “Frodo Decides - Or Does He?” Christianity Today, December 19, 1975, 10-13.

Flieger, Verlyn. A Question of Time: J. R. R. Tolkien’s Road to Faërie. Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1997.

The Jerusalem Bible Reader’s Edition. Gen. ed. Alexander Jones. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1966.

Gordon, Barry. “Kingship, Priesthood and Prophecy in The Lord of the Rings.” Published May 13, 2009. http://uoncc.wordpress.com/2009/05/13/kingship-priesthood-and-prophecy-in-the-lord-of-the-rings/.

Kilby, Clyde S. Tolkien and “The Silmarillion.” Wheaton, IL: Harold Shaw, 1976.

Kreeft, Peter. “Wartime Wisdom: Ten Uncommon Insights About Evil in The Lord of the Rings.” Ed. John G. West, Jr. Celebrating Middle-earth: The Lord of the Rings as a Defense of Western Civilization.Seattle: Inkling Books, 2002.

Martinez, Michael. “Count, count, weigh, divide.” Understanding Middle-earth. Poughkeepsie, NY: ViviSphere Publishing, 2003.

Pearce, Joseph. Tolkien: Man and Myth. San Francisco: Ignatius, 1998.

Purtill, Richard. J. R. R. Tolkien: Myth, Morality & Religion. San Francisco: Ignatius, 2003.

Rutledge, Fleming. The Battle for Middle-earth: Tolkien’s Divine Design in “The Lord of the Rings.” Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2004.

Tolkien, J. R. R. The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien. Edited by Humphrey Carpenter. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2000.

---. The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers, The Return of the King. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1965-66.