Frodo is the Lord of the Rings: A sceptical hypothesis

J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings is an extraordinarily complex piece of high fantasy. Initially drafted as one book, Tolkien was pushed by publishers to divide the series into three, with The Hobbit as a prequel to the events of The Lord of the Rings (henceforth abbreviated as TLotR, and TH). In the Silmarillion, an unfinished work published posthumously by Tolkien’s son Christopher, a godlike creator named Eru or Ilúvatar founded the universe as a musical expression of demigods named Ainur — one of whom, Melkor, broke from the fold to found his own cosmic composition. This leads Eru to create a physical existence of men and elves over which Ainur can preside in physical form. Melkor became Morgoth upon his attempt to conquer the physical realm which came to be known as Middle Earth, by way of chaos and destruction. In Peter Jackson’s film adaptation of Tolkien’s main trilogy, one of the lesser Ainur, a Maia named Gandalf, confronts one of Morgoth’s servants, a giant beast called a Balrog. But wizards like Gandalf are not the only Maia to dwell in Middle Earth alongside dwarves, men, elves, and lesser forms such as peaceful hobbits, on the one hand, and violent orcs (mutated elves), on the other. Sauron is another one of the Maia, first serving under Morgoth before deciding that chaos should serve order, not vice versa. In Thomas Hobbes’ terms, Morgoth wants a Behemoth or state of war, while Sauron wants a Leviathan or state of peace presided over by the threat of violence secured by a totalitarian state with Sauron at the helm. Sauron evades death by forging ‘rings of power’, distributed to the various species, but all subject to his own ‘One Ring’, an attempt to preside over Middle Earth as Eru did over the pre-physical world, and as Melkor tried to do over spiritual and physical worlds. In the Amazon Prime series Rings of Power, Sauron is a man, deceiving even the wise elf Galadriel, just as he later manipulated the wizard Saruman. Sauron appears here as Aragorn did in TLotR, but without the same moral scruples that kept Aragorn from the darkness. But in TLotR we never see Sauron, on the basis that his physical existence was forfeited the last time his ring was removed from him by Aragorn’s ancestor Isildur. Director Peter Jackson avoided letting Aragorn’s fight with Sauron onto the big screen by replacing Sauron with a CGI troll before release. So in the whole of TLotR, both in film and book form, we never see the Lord of the Rings! So who is the Lord of the Rings?

The obvious answer is: Sauron in his physically disembodied form, a ‘lidless eye, wreathed in flame.’ But what if Sauron’s existence is more complicated than that. And what if the reason Sauron can never keep the One Ring he created is that he, Sauron, is not the real Lord of the Rings?

I think there is a lot of evidence supporting the hypothesis that Frodo Baggins (nephew of Bilbo Baggins from The Hobbit) is the true Lord of the Rings, but this is not proof of theory; just a hypothesis. I have to go now but will defend the view later. Let this serve as prologue to a future Fugue, or Frodo …