The answer is World War I. No, really.
It might seem strange to bring up something that’s completely foreign to Middle-Earth when explaining why Frodo left for the Undying Lands. There’s no Somme in Arda; heck, there isn’t even a France. But Tolkien’s experiences with the Great War shaped his writing, especially how he wrote Frodo and Sam.
Let’s back up a bit. In this article, we’ll talk about why Frodo left for the Undying Lands in the context of The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien’s experiences in World War I, and how those experiences shaped the ending of Frodo’s story.
This article will spoil the ending of Lord of the Rings. It also discusses war, death, trauma, and illness.
If you’re studying a story, particularly a fantasy story, you can take one of two perspectives:
These terms come from Sherlock Holmes fandom, but they’re really useful for studying any kind of story! Neither of these perspectives are “better”; they’re different tools in your toolkit. If we want to look at the ending of Frodo’s story, we should look at it from both perspectives.
In the final chapter of The Return of the King, “The Gray Havens”, Frodo and Sam go on one last journey, to the Western coast. At the end of this journey, Frodo will board a ship and pass out of Middle-Earth. Together with Gandalf, and “many elves of the high kindred”, he’ll sail away to the West. He’ll pass on to the land of Valinor, where the gods dwell and where all wounds can be healed.
When Sam asks him where they’re going, they share this exchange:
‘Where are you going, Master?’ cried Sam, though at last he understood what was happening.
‘To the Havens, Sam,’ said Frodo.
‘And I can’t come.’
‘No, Sam. Not yet anyway, not further than the Havens. Though you too were a Ring-bearer, if only for a little while. Your time may come. Do not be too sad, Sam. You cannot be always torn in two. You will have to be one and whole, for many years. You have so much to enjoy and to be, and to do.’
‘But,’ said Sam, and tears started in his eyes, ‘I thought you were going to enjoy the Shire, too. for years and years, after all you have done.’
‘So I thought too, once. But I have been too deeply hurt, Sam. I tried to save the Shire, and it has been saved, but not for me. It must often be so, Sam, when things are in danger: some one has to give them up, lose them, so that others may keep them…”
JRR Tolkien, the Return of the King
During the Quest of the Ring, Frodo was horribly wounded: stabbed at Weathertop, nearly stabbed at Moria, starved and dehydrated. Worse, the influence of the One Ring was enough to twist Smeagol into Gollum; carrying it for even the short amount of time that Frodo carried it irrevocably hurt him. He became pale, quiet, and sad, and began to have strange episodes:
One evening Sam came into the study and found his master looking very strange.
He was very pale and his eyes seemed to see things far away.
‘What’s the matter, Mr. Frodo?’ said Sam.
‘I am wounded,’ he answered, ‘wounded; it will never really heal.’
After bearing the Ring, Frodo couldn’t stay in the Shire and enjoy its peace. He was too wounded, physically and emotionally, to return to his quiet life. He had to leave for Valinor so he could heal and ultimately be at peace.
If you’re at all familiar with WWI history, this will sound horribly familiar…
Most soldiers who fought in WWI were ordinary young men who’d been told their whole lives that war was glorious and manly. No one had prepared them for a war that could best be described as a “meat grinder”. The trenches were muddy, bloody, and miserable. Soldiers lived in constant fear of artillery shells and gas attacks. The casualty rate was astronomical; most soldiers who fought in WWI saw their friends die over and over and over again.
Many of these surviving soldiers wound up with “shell shock” — a condition we’d now call post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD. Men who had shell shock often had debilitating pain, nervous tics, and horrible spirals of guilt and shame. And almost every sufferer had horrible flashbacks — waking nightmares, where they relived the death and despair of the War. To an outside observer, they’d get a “thousand-yard stare”; inwardly, they were back on the battlefield.
“By the end of World War One, the army had dealt with 80,000 cases of ‘shell shock’. As early as 1917, it was recognised that war neuroses accounted for one-seventh of all personnel discharged for disabilities from the British Army. Once wounds were excluded, emotional disorders were responsible for one-third of all discharges….” writes Professor Joanna Burke for the BBC. “What medical officers quickly realised was that everyone had a ‘breaking point’: weak or strong, courageous or cowardly — war frightened everyone witless.”
Shell shock often got worse once you returned to civilian life, not better. People who hadn’t experienced the horrors of war didn’t understand what you’d been through, and British civilians at the time thought war was supposed to be glorious. If you couldn’t handle it, it was your fault. Burke states: “Men arriving at Netley Hospital (for servicemen suffering shell shock) were greeted with silence: people were described as hanging their heads in ‘inexplicable shame’.”
Tolkien was very familiar with shell shock; most English people in the 1920s were. After all, most people had served in the War, or knew someone who had. And Tolkien was no exception.
Like most young men of his generation, Tolkien served in World War I. He was commissioned as a second lieutenant, becoming a signal officer and a cryptographer. Because he served in an ROTC-like program, he wasn’t shipped out until 1916. But by that point, the war had become a meat grinder. “Junior officers were being killed off, a dozen a minute. Parting from my wife then… it was like a death,” Tolkien remembers.
But Tolkien found a way to detach himself from the grimness of war — writing escapist fantasy fiction. Rachel Kambury recalls: “It was in between his duties as officer that Tolkien began to lay the narrative foundations of what would become Middle-earth. They were ‘fairy-stories,’ so-called: little vignettes, concerning gnomes and sprites and elf-like creatures, the kinds of stories with which Tolkien had been loosely enamored ‘since I learned to read.’”
Tolkien caught trench fever, a nasty disease carried by lice. Several months after he was shipped off, he returned home as an invalid. After he returned to England, Tolkien began to seriously work on the mythology he’d started developing in the trenches, writing “the haunting epic of the Fall of Gondolin”. This mythology was the seed that would eventually grow into The Lord of the Rings.
Many of Tolkien’s school friends also served in the war, in a different unit; most of them died in the trenches. Tolkien wrote, “One has indeed personally to come under the the shadow of war to feel fully its oppression… by 1918 all but one of my close friends were dead.”
The war, and its consequences, left its mark on Tolkien. And as he wrote his great epic, it left its mark on his work.
Before we get into the nitty gritty of a Doylist analysis, I do need to point out that The Lord of the Rings was never meant to be a story about WWI. Tolkien loathed allegory; he didn’t want to write a story where The Heroes Were The Allies And The Villains Were The Axis. The Lord of the Rings was always meant to stand on its own, as a fantasy story.
In a 1956 letter, Tolkien wrote: “I hope that you have enjoyed The Lord of the Rings? Enjoyed is the key-word. For it was written to amuse (in the highest sense): to be readable. There is no ‘allegory’, moral, political, or contemporary in the work at all…I think that [the] fairy story has its own mode of reflecting ‘truth’, different from allegory, or (sustained) satire, or ‘realism’, and in some ways more powerful. I did not foresee that before the tale was published we should enter a dark age in which the technique of torture and disruption of personality would rival that of Mordor and the Ring….”
That being said, every writer pulls from their own life experiences to create their work. They especially pull from experiences that stuck with them… like, for instance, losing all your friends in a war that tore an entire generation apart.
Kambury writes, “The Lord of the Rings is not an allegory for World War I. But it doesn’t have to be to be of that war—born from it and in spite of it. And one needn’t strip away the fantasy elements to make it a war novel. The presence of magic does not diminish its right to sit on the shelf next to Remarque and Ford and Hemingway.“
In a letter he wrote to a long-time fan, Tolkien said: “My ‘Samwise’ is indeed (as you note) largely a reflection of the English soldier—grafted on the village-boys of early days, the memory of the privates and my batmen that I knew in the 1914 War, and recognized as so far superior to myself.”
Frodo and Sam are reflections of the English soldiers that Tolkien knew. Sam is written in loving memory of the lower-class young men that Tolkien fought beside. And Frodo is written in loving memory of all the boys who never really made it home. The young men who died in the war, and passed out of the world; the young men who came back to England but left some part of themself on the battlefield.
So, ultimately, why did Frodo leave for the Undying Lands? Because Tolkien knew too many young men who should have gotten to heal. They never did. But Frodo gets to, in their place.
In the words of the hobbit walking song that Frodo sings at the end of Return of the King:
Still round the corner there may wait
A new road or a secret gate;
And though I oft have passed them by,
A day will come at last when I
Shall take the hidden paths that run
West of the Moon, East of the Sun.
That was a heavy article, huh? If you want a palate cleanser, you could read about Tom Bombadil, the most enigmatic joke character of all time.
Next time we’ll talk about something lighter. Maybe we could list off “the most famous swords in Lord of the Rings” or rehash the darn Eagle Argument for the millionth time. Let us know in the comments, or tell us what you’d like to see.
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