“You cried watching it again?” marveled my friend’s brother.

My friend gushed, “I think she sobbed harder this time than she ever did before!”

Even as I watched The Fellowship of the Ring for the sixth time in three months, I yet was found completely absorbed, with swollen eyes and dripping chin by the end. The pages of my copy of The Return of the King are pocked and wrinkled with tears.

“How can you do that?!” everyone asks me.

C.S. Lewis said of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, “Here are beauties which pierce like swords or burn like cold iron: here is a book which will break your heart.”

Beauties which pierce like swords.

The Shire is so very beautiful. As I ride with Frodo and Gandalf in the cart, singing “The road goes ever on and on, down from the door where it began,” a land opens before me, all green and brown and yellow in Middle Earth, where the good life flourishes. Here live hobbits all – sweet maidens of the golden ale, blockheaded Bracegirdles from Hardbottle, Tooks filled with mugs of beer, fair-faced Bagginses with a light almost elvish in their eyes – joyfully in freedom, light, and beauty. Here is a goodly land that my heart delights in, and as the Shadow lengthens over Middle Earth, groping ever towards that beloved Shire, bent to burn out its hobbitholes and bow its brown, curly heads under the yoke, my heart cries out, “Nay, but hobbit feet must not drag chains!” For here, as Sam said to Frodo in the hour of despair, “there is some good in this world yet, and it is worth fighting for!”

The power for this greatest of evils, which threatens my beloved hobbits and all the free peoples of this good world, is bound into the smallest of things – a simple band of gold. So small a thing! “Is it not a strange fate,” said Boromir, “that we should suffer so much fear and doubt for so small a thing?” It would seem so, yet this is a Ring completely evil, which desires to return to the hand from whence it came, the hand of its master, the Dark Lord – “and oh, he is seeking it, seeking it, all his thought is bent upon it.” But he must not have it, for once he has, the onslaught of his will and power, already so great and so seemingly unstoppable, will cover all Middle Earth in the darkness, the blackness, the night and the shadow. How I tremble at the thought, and how I cannot bear to look upon the Eye, “lidless, wreathed in flame.”

The only way to save Middle Earth from this destruction is to carry the Ring to the fires where it was made, and there to cast it away and unmake it.

But ah! The treacherous Ring! How it woos, how it calls to all flesh. It speaks and calls out one’s name. The very sight of it holds one’s eyes fixed upon it. It tempts all at the point where they are weakest, and how hard it is to resist its black call, for it does not allow itself to be cast away. The Ring shrinks when cut from the hand of Sauron himself – to fit the finger of Isildur. When it whispers to them, for a moment we find Bilbo a goblin, Boromir a demon full of curses, and Galadriel a dark queen. Even Frodo holds a sword to his own Sam before he realizes what had taken hold on him. For when the Ring has taken a person, they become but a shadow of who they once were, a shadow enslaved to the will of the Dark Lord. And all the sweet promises of the Ring are shown to be falsehoods, for it answers to one master alone, “and he does not share power.” There is a frightful terror and a warning in this, the almost irresistible pull of the Ring.

Let him who thinks he stands beware lest he fall: “The quest stands upon the edge of a knife. Yet hope remains, while the company is true.”

Who then is able to carry this Ring and to cast it away?

There is a wondrous beauty about the very weeness of the hobbits. It is in their smallness and ordinariness that their strength lies. They are not the fairest to look upon, and they live very quietly, meek and content. They are of precious little interest to the wise and great, and do not seem likely candidates for any great task – “You did not seriously think,” Saruman sneered at Gandalf, “that a hobbit could contend with Sauron?” But in their smallness, hobbits are made of stern stuff (“‘My dear Frodo!’ exclaimed Gandalf. ‘Hobbits really are amazing creatures. You can learn all that there is to know about their ways in a month, and yet after a hundred years they can still surprise you.’”), and though they feel not the courage, they are able to carry the Ring straight past the Eye. The folly of charging a weak, wee hobbit with the quest of the Ring makes a “cloak, a veil before the eyes of the Enemy.” Thus the foolish, the weak, and the despised things of the world confound the wise and mighty (1 Cor. 1:27-28), for as Elrond said, “Such is oft the course of deeds that move the wheels of the world: small hands do them because they must, while the eyes of the great are elsewhere.” Galadriel encouraged Frodo, “Even the smallest person can change the course of the future,” and so four hobbits do, “for the time has now come when hobbits will shape the fortunes of all.”

Thus was Frodo Baggins ordained to bear the Ring.

“I wish I had never seen the Ring!” Frodo cried. “Why did it come to me? Why was I chosen?”

“Such questions cannot be answered,” said Gandalf. “… But you have been chosen, and you must therefore use such strength and heart and wits as you have.” “Bilbo was meant to find the Ring, and not by its maker. In which case you also were meant to have it. And that may be an encouraging thought.”

“It is not,” said Frodo.

***

April Clark is a hobbit living with her family in Washington state. She looks forward to following in the footsteps of Rosie Cotton, who gladdened Sam Gamgee’s heart and bore him fourteen lads and lasses.