Frodo Baggins

Frodo Baggins was born on 22 September in the year 2968 of the Third Age, the only child of Drogo Baggins and Primula Brandybuck. Both parents drowned in a boating accident on the Brandywine when Frodo was still young, and he spent his childhood among his mother's kin at Brandy Hall in Buckland, on the eastern edge of the Shire. In 2989 his elderly cousin Bilbo, who shared his birthday, took him in as his adopted heir, and Frodo moved to Bag End in Hobbiton. When Bilbo left the Shire after his farewell party in 3001, Frodo inherited both the smial and, unknowingly at first, something far more burdensome: the ring his cousin had brought back from his travels.

Frodo belonged to the hobbits, the small, unobtrusive people whose settled homeland was the Shire. Even by the standards of the well-to-do Baggins family he was an unusual hobbit: bookish, fond of walking under the stars, on friendly terms with Elves and with some knowledge of their tongue. The Elf Gildor, meeting him by chance on the road, named him an elf-friend, and Gandalf regarded him as the best hobbit in the Shire — a judgement the events of the War of the Ring would test severely.

The name Frodo, like all hobbit names in the published text, is an English rendering of an original in the Westron tongue; Appendix F explains that masculine hobbit names of this everyday type actually ended in -a and were normalized to -o in translation. The surname Baggins was likewise chosen by the translator to echo the family's ancestral home of Bag End. Beyond his birth name Frodo bore several assumed and honorific names. Travelling to Bree he used the alias Mr. Underhill, a cover suggested by Gandalf, and after the Council of Elrond he was known above all as the Ring-bearer, the title under which he is remembered in the records of the Third Age.

Frodo was born on 22 September in the year 2968 of the Third Age, the only child of Drogo Baggins and Primula Brandybuck. When he was twelve, both his parents drowned in a boating accident on the Brandywine, and the orphaned boy was raised among his mother's kin at Brandy Hall in Buckland. In 2989 his elder cousin Bilbo took him in as his adopted heir and brought him to Bag End in Hobbiton. At the great farewell feast of 3001, held on the birthday the two shared, Bilbo vanished from the Shire for good; Frodo, coming of age at thirty-three that same day, inherited Bag End along with the plain gold ring that Bilbo had carried since his journey to Erebor.

For seventeen years Frodo lived comfortably as master of Bag End, until Gandalf returned in April 3018 with proof that the heirloom was the One Ring, forged by Sauron and now sought by him. Frodo resolved to carry it out of the Shire and, under cover of a move to Buckland, sold Bag End and set out on 23 September 3018, accompanied by Sam Gamgee and Pippin Took, with Merry Brandybuck joining at Crickhollow. Hunted by the Black Riders, the hobbits escaped through the Old Forest with the help of Tom Bombadil and reached Bree, where Frodo travelled under the name Underhill and fell in with the Ranger Aragorn. On Weathertop, on the night of 6 October, the Witch-king wounded him with a Morgul-knife, and only a desperate ride brought the fading Frodo across the Ford of Bruinen to Rivendell on 20 October, where Elrond healed him.

At the Council of Elrond on 25 October 3018, when no other course could be found, Frodo offered of his own will to take the Ring to the fire of Orodruin. He left Rivendell on 25 December as Ring-bearer at the head of a company of nine walkers. In Moria the mithril-mail Bilbo had given him turned a spear-thrust that should have killed him, though the company lost Gandalf at the bridge of Khazad-dûm. After a sojourn in Lothlórien, where Galadriel let him look into her mirror, the remaining company travelled down the Anduin. At Amon Hen on 26 February 3019 Boromir tried to take the Ring by force; Frodo, seeing that it would destroy the company, chose to go on to Mordor alone, and only Sam contrived to go with him.

In the Emyn Muil the two hobbits captured Gollum, who had trailed the Ring since Moria, and Frodo bound him by an oath on the Ring to serve as their guide. Gollum led them through the Dead Marshes to the Black Gate, which proved impassable, and then south through Ithilien, where Faramir of Gondor detained and released them. Guiding them at last to the pass of Cirith Ungol, Gollum betrayed Frodo to the great spider Shelob, whose sting left him paralysed and apparently dead. Sam took the Ring from what he believed was his master's body, but when orcs carried Frodo to the tower of Cirith Ungol he followed and freed him, restoring the burden to the Ring-bearer.

Disguised in orc-gear, Frodo and Sam crossed the plain of Gorgoroth as the Ring grew into an all-consuming weight. On 25 March 3019 they reached the Sammath Naur inside Mount Doom, and there, at the very Crack of Doom, Frodo's will finally broke: he claimed the Ring for himself and put it on. Gollum fell upon him, bit the Ring together with the finger from his hand, and toppled with his prize into the fire, so that the quest was achieved in the moment of its failure. The two hobbits were borne from the erupting mountain by the Eagles, and on the Field of Cormallen the hosts of the West honoured Frodo, who was afterwards remembered in song as Frodo of the Nine Fingers.

Within the legendarium Frodo occupies a role defined by burden rather than by command. As Bilbo's heir he becomes keeper of the One Ring without at first understanding what it is, and at the Council of Elrond he takes up the task of carrying it to the fire in which it was made — an office that comes to be named after him, for he is thereafter the Ring-bearer. He holds no rank, leads no army, and gives few orders; his significance in the War of the Ring rests entirely on what he carries and on his endurance in carrying it.

Frodo possesses no inherent magical power. What sets him apart is the resilience Gandalf attributes to hobbits generally, joined to an uncommon quality of perception that deepens under the Ring's influence: at Weathertop he sees the Ringwraiths in their unclothed forms, on Amon Hen the Seat of Seeing shows him lands far beyond his sight, and in Mordor he is able to bind Gollum by the Ring's own authority, warning him of the fate that oath-breaking will bring. His effective aids are external gifts — Sting, the mithril coat, and Galadriel's phial — while his most consequential act of strength is moral rather than martial: the pity he extends to Gollum, which Gandalf had foreseen might govern the fate of many.

Among his allies, Gandalf stands as mentor and conscience. It was the wizard who identified the Ring, laid the burden of its danger before Frodo, and taught him that pity, not judgement, was the fitting response to a creature like Gollum. Samwise Gamgee, initially his gardener and servant, grew into something closer than kin: Sam followed him from Bag End to Mount Doom, refused every chance to turn back, and in the last extremity carried his exhausted master up the mountain. Merry Brandybuck and Pippin Took bound themselves to him through a conspiracy of friendship, insisting on sharing a road he had meant to walk alone, while Aragorn guarded and guided him from Bree to the breaking of the Fellowship.

His defining adversarial bond is with Gollum, a relationship that tests everything Gandalf taught him. Frodo tamed the creature by oath and firmness, called him by his old name Sméagol, and defended him against Sam's suspicion — even as Gollum led the hobbits toward Shelob's lair in deliberate treachery. The mercy Frodo repeatedly extended proved, in the end, the salvation of the quest: at the Cracks of Doom, when Frodo's own will finally failed and he claimed the Ring, it was Gollum who seized it, taking Frodo's finger with it, and fell with his prize into the fire. In this figure Frodo confronted an image of what the Ring could make of him, and his refusal to destroy Gollum reads as the moral centre of his character.

In Tolkien's earliest work on the sequel to The Hobbit, begun in December 1937 and documented in The Return of the Shadow, the hero of the story was not yet Frodo. After briefly considering Bilbo himself as protagonist, Tolkien introduced a younger hobbit called Bingo, conceived first as Bilbo's son and soon afterwards as an adopted younger cousin under the name Bingo Bolger-Baggins. At this stage the name Frodo already existed in the tale, but it belonged to one of Bingo's young companions, Frodo Took, who travelled with him alongside figures such as Odo and Marmaduke Brandybuck, the forerunner of Meriadoc. Only in what Christopher Tolkien calls the third phase of composition, in the autumn of 1938, did his father transfer the name Frodo to the hero, having concluded that the old name no longer suited a story that was turning far graver than the light sequel originally planned.

Frodo has been portrayed in every major dramatization of The Lord of the Rings. In Ralph Bakshi's animated film of 1978, which covers roughly the first half of the story, he was voiced by Christopher Guard; in the Rankin/Bass animated television film The Return of the King (1980) the part was spoken by Orson Bean. The BBC radio serial of 1981 cast Ian Holm as Frodo — the same actor who two decades later played the elderly Bilbo in Peter Jackson's live-action trilogy (2001–2003), in which Frodo was played by Elijah Wood. Wood reprised the role briefly in the prologue framing of Jackson's first Hobbit film (2012).

Jackson's trilogy departs from the book in several respects that bear directly on the character. The seventeen years between Bilbo's party and Frodo's departure are compressed into a brief interval, so that Frodo leaves the Shire as a visibly young hobbit rather than at fifty. The Old Forest and Tom Bombadil episodes are omitted, and the films add material without counterpart in the novel: Faramir brings the hobbits to Osgiliath, where Frodo comes close to surrendering the Ring to a Nazgûl, and before the pass of Cirith Ungol Frodo, deceived by Gollum's scheming against Sam, sends his companion away. The Scouring of the Shire is likewise absent, and the returning hobbits find their homeland unharmed.