Serious Question: Was Frodo Weak Sauce?

Serious Question is when we pose a question and then try to answer it. Usually the question is not very serious.

Lord of the Rings might be the only massively popular piece of media where most people seem to actively dislike the main character. If you were to rank LotR characters (which, I mean, why not), Frodo doesn’t crack the top 10, and he might miss out on the top 20 once we start looking at bad mofos like Treebeard and the Balrog. Forget putting him above the eagle Gwahir, does Frodo even beat out the little moth that foretells the arrival of Gwahir? It’s a conversation.

Frodo takes a lot of trash-talk. He’s weak. He’s annoying. He’s pathetic. How can a pivotal character, perhaps the most important character in maybe the most important fantasy epic of all time, be so awful? That’s why we’re back in the arena of Serious Question: Is Frodo as weak sauce as we say he is?

To answer this, we’re going to dive deep into the LotR weeds. As in, we’re going to go so deep into the intention and purpose and meaning of these books and movies that you’re going to lose some respect for the author by the time this is over. Though, that being said, we’re talking about how you throw shade at a three-foot guy who walked thousands of miles on his 18-inch legs to save your world from evil, so maybe that’s beside the point. Anyway, let’s start on a surface level.

Elijah Wood—kind of a pasty fellow, isn’t he? If there is indeed a case to be made for Frodo being somehow underrated or underappreciated, Elijah isn’t doing our guy any favors. Now, this is nothing on Elijah’s performance—he’s wonderfully committed and devoted in Lord of the Rings—but on an aesthetic level, he lends Frodo a fragility and softness that isn’t exactly beefing up his cred. If you stripped away all the characters of the fellowship and just had the actors try to take the Ring to Mordor, Elijah Wood is probably close to last on your list (Gandalf’s Ian McKellan beats out Aragorn’s Viggo Mortensen for first, because Viggo kind of seems like a crazy guy. Bonus: Extend this to all LotR characters and Galadriel’s Cate Blanchett wins in a landslide. That woman can do anything).

Anyway, in Lord of the Rings, Frodo comes across as a total weakling. There’s a reason Elrond kind of gives him that, “you kidding me, brah?” stare after the hobbit offers to carry the Ring to Mordor. He’s not exactly rallying the troops. Furthermore, Frodo seems to spend most of his screen time a) grunting in pain, b) swaying with fatigue, and c) fainting from exhaustion. It’s a bad look. Chug some Pedialite, my dude.

If we zoom out a bit and envelop the Rings books in our gaze as well, there seems to be two main complaints with Frodo as a character. Complaint #1: He volunteers to bear the Ring and then sucks at it. Complaint #2: He’s way nicer to Gollum than he should be, and if he had any sense, he’d kick Gollum to the curb and lean on Sam “Eternal MVP” Gamgee the rest of the way. If we want to say Frodo isn’t weak sauce, we’d need to find ways to counter, or at least justify, those two ideas.

This is where we’re going to start talking about the books a bit, and we’re going to treat them as works of literature, so pull the safety bar down and hang on, kids. This is gonna be geeky.

Complaint #1: Frodo stinks at bearing the Ring. He’s too weak.
Honestly? Word. Frodo is a horrible Ringbearer. It’s hard to imagine anyone being worse at it, really. On innumerable occasions, Frodo always seems to be dancing right on the brink of handing the Ring back over to Sauron and plunging the known world into an eternity of darkness. He’s kidnapped by orcs. He’s poisoned by Shelob, the giant spider. He’s seduced by the Dead Marshes. He falls victim to a one-man conspiracy within his own fellowship (RIP, Boromir) before striking out on his own and abandoning his two most powerful allies (Gandalf and Aragorn). Heck, he almost leaves Sam behind that day, too. That’s unforgivable. Illogical. Baffling. Yet, it’s not even the worst thing that Frodo does. Remember this scene at Mount Doom, the finish line of the entire journey?

Frodo ultimately gives in to the Ring’s power—he doesn’t destroy it. Thanks to Gollum the whole saving-the-world thing t seems (seems?) to happen by accident. It’s the ultimate “you had one job” moment. Weak sauce behavior.

But would anyone have done better? It’s hard to say. What’s always underrated in every Lord of the Rings thought experiment (because, duh, there are a ton of those) is how powerful the Ring is. Remember that this artifact was crafted to be the literal vessel of evil. It’s the physical manifestation of temptation, coercion, and corruption, forged to usher in an age of domination and destruction. It burns its outline around Frodo’s throat. My man, do you even need Cliffnotes? The symbology is clear.

The Ring devastates non-Frodo characters, too. Gandalf can’t touch it. Galadriel succumbs to its allure. Even Sam is caught up in its deceit after holding it for only a few hours. Frodo wore the Ring around his neck for six months after leaving the Shire. The entire force of the world’s evil rested inches from his miniature hobbit heart for half a year. That’s not exactly a summer Euro-trip, you know? With this in mind, we can give him a little more leeway for acting like such a candy-caned skidmark for three movies and 1000 pages. That doesn’t resolve all our issues, but there’s more to be said here in relation to the next complaint.

Complaint #2: Frodo is too soft on Gollum.
Yeah, he gives the guy a lot of chances, that’s for sure. It strikes one as a bit illogical after a while, because there are a ton of obvious moments when Gollum is clearly plotting to kill the hobbits and Frodo lets him off the hook for it, but there is a sneaky reason Frodo keeps him around.

Remember this moment? It’s overlooked a lot, but it’s a remarkable bit of foreshadowing by Gandalf. The key quote: “Even the very wise cannot see all ends. My heart tells me that Gollum has some part to play yet, for good or ill, before this is over.”

And remember who ultimately succumbed to his lust for the Ring so much that, in losing his senses, he fell backward with the Ring into the fire and destroyed it? Gollum. Frodo kept Gollum around out of mercy and pity; indeed, he spared Gollum, and it was in sparing the wretch that opened the door for fate to overcome Frodo’s own failures there in the cracks of the mountain. It’s a rather profound bit of puppetry from J.R.R. Tolkien. Frodo doesn’t succeed in his quest because he was cunning and strategic. In fact, it is his prevailing love and mercy that allows him to indirectly save Middle Earth. You know what that is in bumper-sticker form? Love wins, yo. Love wins.

So is Frodo weak sauce? Yeah, no doubt, but his weakness has a purpose in elevating Lord of the Rings’ thematic resonance and thematic complexity. In Frodo’s failures we realize the significance of the burden he carries, and in his continued mercy we realize the significance of enduring hope, even when all seems lost. Frodo’s weakness does not make him a bad character. In fact, it makes him a better, more complicated, more interesting character than he ever could be if he were simply a paragon of strength and virtue. His limpness gives the story that much more muscle.

It's another reason Lord of the Rings is so seminal. The protagonist fails his mission. How many other series or epics can claim such a nuance? We sit and bemoan how many endings saturate Return of the King because we aren’t used to a story ending in such a complicated way. Even though the mission is ultimately accomplished, Tolkien doesn’t neglect the messy complications that arose out of completing the quest. We have to address the trauma of meeting evil face-to-face. We have to address the reparations that rise in the wake of war. We have to find a new anchor for our hope after a lifetime of doom. To oversimplify this world-shaking moment for Middle Earth would trivialize the messages and motivations behind the story. Destroying the Ring was a huge deal, and seeing the first few ripple effects is critical.

For Frodo—or Tolkien, by extension—to dust off his hands and skip back to the Shire with Sam would have betrayed the scale and weight of what the fellowship accomplished. In lingering on the failures and restorations and departures and reflections, we’re made to look back on the road to victory and find lessons in the moments our heroes turned off the path. That is what Frodo was all about as a character, and there’s a greater power in that—a permanence, a legacy … even here at the end of all things.