Introduction

Maura Mellon

Violence infuses the world around us. The news reports fresh attacks and bombings every day. Books depict timeless conflicts and struggles. We need only turn to our televisions and movie theaters to watch epic battles on the grandest scale.
Often these stories, fictional or not, focus on a figure that looms above all others in the conflict: the hero, be he a warrior “with the strength of thirty in the grip of each hand” (Heaney 27) or a lady “worthy of being pleased” (Austen 247). Heroes bring the recurring conflict of good versus evil, the most persistent dilemma of humanity, to our attention again and again. One must not, however, be tall, strong, or even particularly clever to qualify as a hero; in fact, many literary works focus on the struggles of small, ordinary people who must nonetheless face challenges equal to or exceeding those of their more illustrious counterparts.
Among the most compelling of these tales ranks J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, in which the confrontation between good and evil takes place on multiple battlefields at once. Though the armies of light and dark clash many times in the lavishly described wars in Tolkien’s Middle-earth, ultimately it is the inner struggles of three of the story’s most diminutive characters that linger in the reader’s mind.
Frodo Baggins, the main protagonist, Samwise Gamgee, his gardener and closest friend, and the creature Gollum form a trio of characters who face the deepest conflict in the heart of mankind. Critics throughout the decades since the book’s original publication have not failed to recognize the intriguing aspects of Frodo, Sam, and Gollum’s relationship to each other. There hardly exists, however, a consensus about just what Tolkien was attempting to express with his tale of hobbits and Rings of Power, and a variety of interpretations have come to light and to publication.