The Decision to Go

The Council of Elrond is one of the longest chapters in The Lord of the Rings and one of the most static. Almost nothing happens in terms of action. A group of people sit in a courtyard in Rivendell and talk for hours. They tell stories, argue, accuse one another, propose plans that others dismiss. It is, essentially, a meeting. And like all meetings where something important gets decided, what matters is not what is said but the moment someone says what nobody wants to say.

That moment comes near the end, after all the great ones, the elves, the wizards, the men, the dwarves, have exhausted their arguments and their options. Nobody wants to carry the Ring to Mordor. Nobody volunteers. There is a silence Tolkien describes with a playwright’s precision, a silence where everyone looks at the floor or looks away, and in that silence Frodo says: “I will take the Ring, though I do not know the way.”

He doesn’t shout. He doesn’t leap to his feet. Tolkien writes that he spoke in a small voice, as though surprised to hear himself speaking. And that is all. That is the founding act of the entire novel. A four-foot hobbit who doesn’t know how to fight, who has never left his country, who a few weeks ago was thinking about his birthday, accepts a mission that will in all likelihood kill him. And he accepts it not because he has a plan, not because he has confidence, not because he believes he can do it, but because he realised that if he doesn’t, nobody will. Or worse: someone more powerful will, and power is precisely the problem.

What interests me about this scene is what it says about heroism, a concept that modern fiction has rather badly damaged. We are used to heroes who are chosen. Harry Potter is the chosen one. Luke Skywalker has the Force in his blood. Neo is the one. In all these stories, the hero possesses something special, something innate that sets him apart and justifies why it should be him and not somebody else who saves the world. It is an aristocratic model of heroism, if you think about it: the hero is a hero because he was born a hero, the same way a king is a king because he was born a king.

Frodo has none of that. Frodo is not the chosen one. Nobody chose him. Gandalf didn’t point a finger at him and no prophecy named him. What happened is that the Ring reached him through a chain of accidents: Bilbo found it in a cave, Bilbo gave it to Frodo, and now Frodo has it. That is all. No destiny. No lineage. No special blood. Just a person who has a thing and who decides to do something with it because he understands it is right.

Tolkien, who was a serious Catholic, knew what he was doing. In Catholic theology there is the idea that grace works through the humblest of means. God does not choose the mighty but the small, not kings but fishermen, not the wise but the simple. It is an inversion of common sense that appears again and again in the Gospels: the last shall be first, the meek shall inherit the earth, the mustard seed becomes the largest tree. Frodo is that idea rendered as narrative fiction, without direct allegory, without Tolkien needing to explain it, simply through the way the story works.

But there is something subtler still in Frodo’s decision, and it is the clause he adds: “though I do not know the way.” I don’t know the way. A phrase that could be weakness and is in fact the most honest form of courage. Frodo does not say “I will destroy the Ring.” He promises no results. He guarantees nothing. What he says is that he will go. That he will walk in that direction. That he will carry the thing as long as he can. What happens after that is beyond his control, and Frodo has the lucidity not to pretend otherwise.

This is rare in fiction and rare in life. Most heroes, real or fictional, need to believe they are going to win. They need a plan, a strategy, at least an illusion of control. Frodo has none of these. From the Council onwards, Frodo knows he will probably fail. Elrond tells him as much: the mission is nearly impossible and possibly suicidal. And Frodo says yes anyway.

There is a name for that in the philosophical tradition. Kierkegaard would call it a leap of faith. Not faith in the sense of confidence in an outcome, but faith in the sense of acting without guarantees, of committing to something whose end you cannot see. It is the structure of the genuine religious act: you don’t believe because you have proof, you believe in spite of not having it. Frodo doesn’t walk to Mordor because he thinks he’ll make it. He walks because going is the right thing to do, and the right thing doesn’t stop being right because the odds are against you.

The other thing that makes Frodo’s decision unique is his relationship to power, or rather to the absence of power. At the Council there are people far better qualified for the mission in conventional terms. Aragorn is a seasoned warrior who knows the roads of the world. Gandalf is a semidivine being whose powers exceed any mortal’s. Boromir is a general hardened by war. Legolas is an immortal elf with superhuman senses. Gimli is a dwarf, strong and enduring. Any of them, in terms of capability, would be a better candidate than Frodo to cross half a continent into the heart of enemy territory.

But the mission does not require capability. It requires the opposite. It requires someone who will not be tempted to use the Ring, and the temptation to use the Ring is in direct proportion to the bearer’s power. Gandalf cannot carry it because he would use it to do good, and good done with absolute power becomes tyranny. Aragorn cannot carry it because he is the heir of Isildur, who already failed before the Ring once. Boromir cannot carry it, as the novel demonstrates with painful clarity. Frodo can carry it because he is small, because he is weak, because he has no ambition to rule, because his deepest wish is to go home and live in peace. What in any other context would be insufficiency is here the perfect qualification.

There is a political paradox in this that Tolkien never articulates in explicit terms but that the novel embodies on every page: the best bearers of power are those who do not want it. An idea that echoes Plato, who argued in The Republic that the people most fit to govern are the philosophers, precisely because governing doesn’t interest them. An idea that echoes Cincinnatus, the Roman consul who left the plough to save Rome and then returned to the plough. And an idea that real politics confirms in uncomfortable ways: the most dangerous leaders tend to be those who most want power, and the most decent tend to be those who accept power as a burden rather than a prize.

Frodo accepts the Ring as a burden. Never once, in the entire novel, does he see it as an opportunity. He never thinks about what he could do with it, the power it would give him, the things he could change. He sees it as something that must be destroyed, a problem that must be solved, a weight that must be carried to a place where it can be let go. And the fact that in the end he cannot let go, that at the Crack of Doom the weight defeats him and he claims the Ring as his own, does not invalidate the heroism of the journey. It completes it. Because what Tolkien shows is that heroism is not success. Heroism is the road. It is the decision to go knowing you probably won’t be able to finish. It is the acceptance that your will has limits, that there are forces in the world that exceed the human capacity for resistance, and that the correct response to this is not to refrain from trying but to try knowing you will need help, grace, mercy, something that does not depend on you.

There is a line from Gandalf that sums it up. When Frodo, early in the novel, grieves that the Ring came to him, when he says he wishes none of this had happened, Gandalf replies: “So do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”

It is one of those lines people share on the internet stripped of context, but in context it is shattering. What Gandalf tells Frodo is, in essence, Tolkien’s answer to the oldest question in moral philosophy: what do I do when the world puts me in a situation I didn’t choose and cannot control? The answer is not to control the situation. The answer is to decide what you do with it. You didn’t choose the circumstances, but you choose the response. And Frodo’s response, at the Council, in a small voice, with no plan, no map, no special abilities, is the best answer literature ever invented: I’ll go. I don’t know how, but I’ll go.

Tolkien fought at the Battle of the Somme in 1916. He was twenty-four. He watched most of his friends die. He didn’t talk much about the war, but he once said that his experience in the trenches taught him that the real heroes were not the officers but the rank and file, the ordinary men who did what needed doing without expecting glory or recognition. The hobbits are those soldiers. Frodo is that soldier. A small, ordinary, frightened man who stands up and walks towards what will probably destroy him, not because he is exceptional but because he understood that you don’t need to be exceptional to do what is right. You only need to decide to go.