# WHY did the wound not heal from the mogul blade on Frodo after one of the nine kings of the Nazgul pierced him?



## lorddanielossy (Nov 28, 2019)

After a year of dropping the ring of power in lavas of Modor, why did the wound from the mogul blade not heal?.was the medicine of the elves not enough to cure him, did he have to carry the wound for the rest of his life even in the west?


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## Ithilethiel (Nov 29, 2019)

I don't have access to Tolkien's letters so I'm not sure if he mentions the reason why within his writings there. Elrond was able to heal his body but we all know we can suffer in many ways. I've always looked at it as Tolkien's way of emphasizing the heart of sacrifice. Don't forget he served in a combat role in WWI. He knew firsthand that though outwardly warriors survive and may look healthy that many of them bear the invisible wounds of battle. Their sacrifices though they may have saved many others do not leave them unscathed. That is the nature of sacrifice. It is something known by the person before they act and so shows a willingness of the spirit to be potentially wounded or even killed in a selfless act such as Frodo bearing the One Ring in order to destroy it. That's always been the way I've looked at it.


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## Deleted member 12094 (Nov 30, 2019)

I fully agree with Itilethiel:

_‘There is no real going back. Though I may come to the Shire, it will not seem the same; for I shall not be the same. I am wounded with knife, sting, and tooth, and a long burden. Where shall I find rest?’_​_Gandalf did not answer._​
The book brings this as a given fact which the reader has to accept. However there is another aspect, a literature one: like a Shakespearean story or a Greek drama the hero fights against his will against evil too great for him to overcome, he fails and then loses everything he had been fighting for. He is all sacrifice, as Itilethiel pointed out, and for dramatic effect he pays the ultimate price.

This role is for Frodo. His mission failed in the end (the Ring was destroyed indeed, but no more by him since he yielded to the ultimate temptation), he could not recover, gave Bag End away and left the Shire forever.


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## lorddanielossy (Dec 21, 2019)

Ithilethiel said:


> I don't have access to Tolkien's letters so I'm not sure if he mentions the reason why within his writings there. Elrond was able to heal his body but we all know we can suffer in many ways. I've always looked at it as Tolkien's way of emphasizing the heart of sacrifice. Don't forget he served in a combat role in WWI. He knew firsthand that though outwardly warriors survive and may look healthy that many of them bear the invisible wounds of battle. Their sacrifices though they may have saved many others do not leave them unscathed. That is the nature of sacrifice. It is something known by the person before they act and so shows a willingness of the spirit to be potentially wounded or even killed in a selfless act such as Frodo bearing the One Ring in order to destroy it. That's always been the way I've looked at it.


well said.



Merroe said:


> I fully agree with Itilethiel:
> 
> _‘There is no real going back. Though I may come to the Shire, it will not seem the same; for I shall not be the same. I am wounded with knife, sting, and tooth, and a long burden. Where shall I find rest?’_​_Gandalf did not answer._​
> The book brings this as a given fact which the reader has to accept. However there is another aspect, a literature one: like a Shakespearean story or a Greek drama the hero fights against his will against evil too great for him to overcome, he fails and then loses everything he had been fighting for. He is all sacrifice, as Itilethiel pointed out, and for dramatic effect he pays the ultimate price.
> ...


well i don;tthink frodo's mission failed. The ring was destroyed.From the way i see it at the end when the elves were laving middle earth, the other hobbits did not know Frodo will leave too he said"w set out to save the shire". I guess frodo's real home was in the west.Even bilbo was taken too.


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## Alcuin (Dec 21, 2019)

Frodo’s wound healed, physically at any rate. The problem is that some wounds leave you weakened or permanently damaged. I had a major medical emergency this spring, followed by surgery: I am alive, thank God, but my life is permanently changed, and although my mind is clear, my body is not quite the same. 

Frodo’s experience was even more visceral. Elrond effectively performed surgery on him to remove the splinter left by the notched Morgul knife, but Frodo had been though not merely a physical trauma, not even an emotional trauma, but a spiritual one. Passing by Weathertop a year to the day after the Witch-king’s attack that nearly wraithified him brought to mind all those experiences from Weathertop to the Ford of Bruinen. His encounter with Shelob involved not only a medical emergency from the creature’s poison, but the trauma of awakening naked among the savage Orcs, enduring their pawing, questioning, beatings, and threats, in addition to the horror of believing he had lost the Ring and so lost the whole game. Worst of all, he “failed” at Mount Doom, and his mission was accomplished only because he had shown mercy to Gollum, who in a fit of rage bit the Ring from his hand and fell into the Crack of Doom. 

Without turning to _Letters of JRR Tolkien_ for quotations (I don’t want to spend a couple of hours on this today), I think I can summarize the situation. Frodo did not see himself as a hero: he was deeply troubled by what he perceived as his “failure” to destroy the Ring. (Tolkien says that one reader wrote that Frodo was a traitor and should have been executed; I believe he described the letter as “savage”, but I don’t want to look it up to be certain.) He was seriously wounded twice, by the Witch-king and by Shelob, and Gollum maimed his hand (which was a blessing, though a difficult blessing to accept). He wanted only to return to the Shire and resume his life as before, but this was no longer possible. 

His passage to Tol Eressëa was a “purgatorial” journey, so that he might be healed _if possible_ before he died. Tolkien notes that no Hobbit could be completely happy without another of his own kind, and Bilbo was the person Frodo most loved; and the journey for Bilbo was both a reward by which he experienced “pure Elvishness” and purgatorial for him also: the Ring left its mark on Bilbo as well. Toward the end of his life, after his wife Rose died and was no longer there to stabilize him (something we see only in the unpublished “Epilogue” found in _Sauron Defeated_, where she draws him back from what we might call a post traumatic stress disorder experience – Tolkien would call it battle fatigue or shell shock; the most recent term is “combat stress reaction”), Sam also went into the West, and we are left to believe that he and Frodo spent their final years together. 

Tolkien says also that part of Frodo’s problem was _pride_, and that this underlay much of his inability to heal psychologically. The journey to Tol Eressëa was meant to allow him to see himself and his “smallness” or “littleness” in the great sweep of the history of Arda, so that he was restored to a proper perspective; and without digging into the text this afternoon, I am afraid I can only point others to that idea so that you can find it yourselves.


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## Olorgando (Dec 21, 2019)

Alcuin said:


> ...
> Tolkien says also that part of Frodo’s problem was _pride_, and that this underlay much of his inability to heal psychologically. ...


As I also dimly recall this writing of JRRT, I do not doubt your quote. What puzzles me in the extreme is that JRRT himself would say this about Frodo.
Never mind PJ's early and annoying depiction of Frodo as a junkie. The latter term would have helped many negative JRRT LoTR critics to "get it" - or perhaps not.
But nothing JRRT ever wrote can have been as crushing, pulverizing, atomizing even to any "pride" than Frodo's experience of carrying the One Ring, especially after he and Sam had crossed the Anduin to its eastern shore (and met Gollum - showing Frodo horrifyingly what might happen to him).

At the end of the book, there is the comment (in Book Six, chapter IX "The Grey Havens"), that "Frodo dropped quietly out of all doings of the Shire, and Sam was pained to notice how little honor he had in his own country (!!!). Few people knew or wanted to know about his deeds and adventures; their admiration and respect were given mostly to Mr. Meriadoc and Mr. Peregrin and (if Sam had known it) to himself."

Sam may have been pained. Frodo not in the least, not by this, anyway. And Sam as, besides Bilbo, the only surviving Ring-bearer, if only for about a day, would have been better at judging, however superficially, the existential struggle Frodo had to cope with compared to the "merely Boromiric" exploits of Merry and Pippin in the scouring of the Shire. How JRRT came to attribute "pride" as an issue for the one character he had basically spent over 1000 pages in destroying its last vestiges, without parallel in anything else he ever wrote (not published himself in his own lifetime) - must be one of these quickly-written, thoughtless (in the sense of his usual merciless revision) asides being preserved in the letters as published by Humphrey Carpenter (with assistance by Christopher Tolkien). Which is why I view, as I have stated before, the "Letters", even though actually written by JRRT himself, with the deepest suspicion as to their being useful as "canon". Then the "New Hobbit" stuff published by CRT in "The Return of The Shadow" (vol. 6 of HoMe) is, too.

Um, nope.


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## lorddanielossy (Jan 7, 2020)

Alcuin said:


> Frodo’s wound healed, physically at any rate. The problem is that some wounds leave you weakened or permanently damaged. I had a major medical emergency this spring, followed by surgery: I am alive, thank God, but my life is permanently changed, and although my mind is clear, my body is not quite the same.
> 
> Frodo’s experience was even more visceral. Elrond effectively performed surgery on him to remove the splinter left by the notched Morgul knife, but Frodo had been though not merely a physical trauma, not even an emotional trauma, but a spiritual one. Passing by Weathertop a year to the day after the Witch-king’s attack that nearly wraithified him brought to mind all those experiences from Weathertop to the Ford of Bruinen. His encounter with Shelob involved not only a medical emergency from the creature’s poison, but the trauma of awakening naked among the savage Orcs, enduring their pawing, questioning, beatings, and threats, in addition to the horror of believing he had lost the Ring and so lost the whole game. Worst of all, he “failed” at Mount Doom, and his mission was accomplished only because he had shown mercy to Gollum, who in a fit of rage bit the Ring from his hand and fell into the Crack of Doom.
> 
> ...


so tell me is it possible to watch an epilogue of the return of the king?like a movie or book?



Olorgando said:


> As I also dimly recall this writing of JRRT, I do not doubt your quote. What puzzles me in the extreme is that JRRT himself would say this about Frodo.
> Never mind PJ's early and annoying depiction of Frodo as a junkie. The latter term would have helped many negative JRRT LoTR critics to "get it" - or perhaps not.
> But nothing JRRT ever wrote can have been as crushing, pulverizing, atomizing even to any "pride" than Frodo's experience of carrying the One Ring, especially after he and Sam had crossed the Anduin to its eastern shore (and met Gollum - showing Frodo horrifyingly what might happen to him).
> 
> ...


please i will like to have a lis of books to read of the after life of froso,gendaf and legolas.


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## Alcuin (Jan 7, 2020)

The “Epilogue” was published by JRR Tolkien’s son Christopher Tolkien in _Sauron Defeated_, which includes his father’s notes on not only the end of _The Lord of the Rings_, but also on “Akallabêth” or “The Downfall of Númenor” and on an unfinished and unpublished book, “The Notion Club Papers”, intended to be a matched trilogy to CS Lewis’ Space Trilogy, _Out of the Silent Planet,_ _Perelandra,_ and _That Hideous Strength_. An abridged version of _Sauron Defeated_ covering only the material relating to _The Lord of the Rings_ is available, entitled _The End of the Third Age_ that includes the “Epilogue” but excludes all the material relating to Númenor and “The Notion Club”. 

_Sauron Defeated_ is the fourth volume of a series called _The History of The Lord of the Rings_, and the four volumes of that series in turn are volumes 6, 7, 8, and 9 of the 13-volume series _The History of Middle-earth_, frequently referred to as _HoMe_. (Volume 13 is an index to the other 12 texts.) _HoMe_, however, is pretty intense and can be quite boring, unless you’re very interested in how the stories arose in the first place, and how they were shaped and molded over the decades. 

If you want to read more Tolkien, though, the best path to take is probably to first read _The Silmarillion_, a compendium of Tolkien’s stories about the First Age that he unsuccessfully tried to publish during his lifetime; and _Unfinished Tales_. _Unfinished Tales_ is divided into four parts: Part Three includes “The Quest of Erebor”, a retelling of _The Hobbit_ by Gandalf to Frodo, Legolas, Gimli, Merry, Pippin, and Sam in Minas Tirith after the War of the Ring but before the wedding of Aragorn and Arwen: Gandalf says that Bilbo initially made an ass of himself when he first met the Thorin and Dwarves: Bilbo “did not realize at all how fatuous the Dwarves thought him, nor how angry they were with” Gandalf. Next is the story, “The Hunt for the Ring”, which covers the movements of the Nazgûl as they searched for “Shire”, first in the Vales of Anduin, finally chasing Frodo almost to Rivendell. Part Four includes two excellent essays, “The Istari” about the Wizards, particularly Gandalf and Saruman, and “The Palantíri”. 

Another book you might consider is _Reader’s Companion_, which I find useful. Scholars Wayne Hammond and Christine Scull, husband and wife, use Tolkien’s own notes, many of which are elsewhere unpublished, to trace the movements of the Nazgûl, the motives of various characters, and various insights from other commentators to broaden the scope of the story. 

Finally, if you’re _really_ interested in what Tolkien thought, you might get a copy of _The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien_, a collection of 354 letters written by Tolkien during his lifetime, whose individual entries are usually referred to as _Letter_ and its number in the collection. On occasion, one of the letters will come up for auction: that’s always interesting, too.


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