Mat Messerschmidt
Goodness in The Lord of the Rings: Frodo Baggins is the Hero We Need
In the late 1990s and the early 2000s, J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings enjoyed quite the renaissance. On June 26, 1997 (my eleventh birthday), the first Harry Potter book was published, almost immediately drawing comparisons to The Lord of the Rings – most of them favoring The Lord of the Rings, despite the immense popularity of Harry Potter. Many celebrated the Harry Potter books for getting kids to read, but others dubbed them the manifestation of TV culture, TV in book form, a criticism that in the 90s counted as just about the worst thing that a self-serious Bohemian intellectual could say about, well, anything. Harold Bloom, probably the single literary critic most well-known to the American public, declared the Rowling books “slop” and “an endless string of clichés,” a sentiment expressed by many well-read people who in the next breath mentioned The Lord of the Rings as a positive foil. In addition to the stylistic comparison, a severe moral contrast was made at Harry Potter’s expense: devout Christians claimed that the Potter series “blurred the lines between good and evil,” to use a phrase that was often invoked verbatim, whereas Tolkien’s trilogyhad not blurred those lines. As the total sum of people who viewed themselves either as too sophisticated for “TV culture” or as too pure for moral ambiguity encompassed quite a large and ideologically varied swath of the United States in the late 90s, the array of comparisons made with the hit Harry Potterseries played to the tremendous benefit of The Lord of the Rings, and many young people, including myself, had read the trilogy in the years shortly before the wildly successful movies hit the scene in 2001. With the movies, The Lord of the Rings reached a new echelon of cultural cache: even the overbearingly cultured urbanites who, in the 90s and aughts, were endlessly intoning that “The movie is always better than the book” said of the Lord of the Rings movies, “The movies make the books better” – something they’ve never admitted, to my knowledge, about any other film adaptation before or since.
Today the Lord of the Rings renaissance feels like a very long time ago: the terms in which the book trilogy and movies were discussed back then seem antiquated. Thankfully, we are largely past the era in which the hyper-sophisticated inform us of their sophistication by declaring grandiosely that they read books instead of “consuming” movies and TV as do the fallen masses. More importantly, though, it is hard to imagine anyone I know today praising a work of art for drawing a firm red line between good and evil – simply because everyone, irrespective of ideology, has gotten used to an extreme lack of consensus regarding what is good and what is evil. In the age of the algorithm, all ethical questions are politicized, and all politics are balkanized. More native to our current social world is popular art that argues to us about what is good and what is evil, or that leaves us in the dark, at least for a while, regarding where exactly the forces of good and evil lie in the story being told. This stands in contrast to Tolkien’s work, in which the lines between good (“The Shire,” “Rohan,” “Gondor”) and evil (“Mordor”) are literally drawn in map form in an appendix, which can be examined before one even begins to read.
If we cannot produce or appreciate worlds like Tolkien’s today, what does that say about us?
It seems to me that there is both danger and enrichment in spending time in the moral universe of Middle Earth. On the one hand, too insistent a desire for a world that does not “blur the lines between good and evil” runs the risk of becoming, at a certain point, delusional and self-indulgent. Ethical dilemmas are an enduring human reality, and this was true long before the clash of competing moral outlooks in multicultural society. If the point in praising Tolkien’s world for keeping good cleanly separated from evil is to suggest that his books can offer young minds a healthy sense of how the world really works, then this claim comes from the standpoint of someone thoroughly detached from reality. The adventure quest, which as a genre involves a long journey, is so perennially appealing in part because it allows the defense of goodness almost to be quantified in miles, as the hero or the heroic party edges closer to its final destination. If Frodo can only get to Mount Doom, he will have fought successfully on behalf of goodness. But the psychological appeal of this simplicity is due at least in part to the fact that being good in the real world is always actually more complicated than this. Even when we know what ends would be good, the means to those ends are rarely as simple as the task of closing the distance between one point on a map and another. At times, the way the movies condense dialogue and action distills the stark moral grid on which the actors operate, sometimes so hyperbolically as to cause amusement. “He is gathering all evil to him,” says Saruman to Gandalf – and then, just a couple lines later, “we must join him.” What a crisis of conscience Gandalf must have faced as he considered this offer! Every LOTR human or humanoid figure I can think of who chooses to serve evil over good does so under the literal enchantment of the One Ring of Power (Isildur, Gollum, Boromir, Saruman). All this is just to say that the world of Middle Earth is a fantasy world not only in terms of its inhabitants, but also in terms of its moral construction. To let the fantasy become too real, to imply to young minds that Tolkien’s world is simply a metaphorical depiction of moral reality, would be to encourage naivete.
But two things can be true at the same time, and there is a lesson embedded in the moral simplicity of the battle for Middle Earth, as well: heroic action like that of Frodo is made possible by the presence of a sense of the good that runs too deep to be questioned. If, in some alternative version of Tolkien’s story, Frodo had an ambivalent relationship with the Shire, if he were unsure that it was basically good and basically worth saving, The Lord of the Rings would be a very different work. Suppose Frodo were to become fully convinced of the need to destroy the ring only after hearing a fiery pro-Shire polemic delivered by a Shire politician presenting himself as a Shire nationalist, or as an anti-colonialist hobbit resisting Mordor hegemony. Armed, finally, with all the right arguments, would Frodo then set out for Mount Doom? If he did so under these circumstances, would we believe in his ability to resist the power of the ring as long as he does? Frodo’s strength depends on the moral simplicity of the world in which he finds himself, on the fact that the goodness of the Shire is as self-evident as is the pleasantness of its traditions of “second breakfast” and “elevenses.” The extent of the simplicity of this moral universe is unrealistic, but Tolkien’s work really does speak to the power of a certain kind of simplicity, of knowing what is good in a way that is too deep to be debatable, of having a strong and constant ethical north star – of not, we might say, perpetually putting the Good up for review, in our hearts or in our public discourse. Indeed, everything about the character of Frodo Baggins attests to the strength found in constancy and simplicity. This simplicity is not just naivete.
The radicality of Frodo’s heroism is due not only to the dangers he subjects himself to, but also to the fact that he does what he does largely unseen. Indeed, not being seen is his constant obsession, and visibility or invisibility is a constant obsession of Tolkien’s books. The ring allows (or does not allow!) Frodo to escape notice, as does having the stature of a hobbit. The fellowship burrows under mountains in Moria to escape notice, and then Frodo and Sam evade the Great Eye via the secret pass into Mordor. The very symbol of evil, the Eye, would subject everything and everyone to permanent visibility.
If the social media age is the age that understands moral behavior as declarative performance, as the act of being seen declaring oneself to be on side that opposes whatever one understands to be evil, can such an age even make sense of such a character? Perhaps Frodo Baggins is the hero we need today.
INDICAȚII DE CITARE
Mat Messerschmidt ,,Goodness in The Lord of the Rings: Frodo Baggins is the Hero We Need’’ în Anthropos. Revista de filosofie, arte și umanioare nr. 6 / 2026
Acest articol este protejat de legea drepturilor de autor; orice reproducere / preluare integrală sau parțială, fără indicarea sursei, este strict interzisă.
