Frodo Fadin, Fadin away

Falterroy

New Member
Hi, So I am up to episode 95, about halfway at the moment so I know some of this topic was covered but I don't know if this has been revisited and I want to post this idea before I forget it entirely. I also apologise for this being a long and tangential post.

So I always interpreted Gandalf saying he read frodo's mind as in clued together the parts of Frodo's babbling. I wanted to point out that it is possible Gandalf was having flashbacks to when he interrogated Gollum. I wonder for example, if Frodo when speaking out loud, argued with himself.
"I should let them all rot and die in the barrow, Gandalf will understand...no...no I can't I have to save them..."
and so on. I can imagine that Gandalf would have been on the edge of his seat listening to all the babble, and been relieved as Frodo overcame his darker impulses many times, which Gollum never did. Possibly the babbling was apart of Elrond's healing, which drove out some of the evil from Frodo caused by the Morgul blade and may have surfaced much of Frodo's guilt and ill memories.

Another point I wanted to raise is that it is always assumed that Frodo fainted at the river after the Ringwraiths were vanquished by the waves. Because everything went dark. I wanted to posit another theory which is that it is possible that Frodo did not faint, but succumbed to the power of the wraiths. He may have been in a Zombie like state. It is possible that Frodo after a certain point of his fading process had let the wraith side take over his mind. It had been mentioned before that the process of wraithification should have Frodo slowly become a wraith. What would the ringwraiths have done if they made it across the river, and then Frodo just fell off his horse unconscious? Kamul would have had to hop of his horse, pick Frodo up and throw him on one of the horses. This could be feasible, but is hard to imagine the Nazgul doing this in their pre-upgade states. And if Frodo becoming unconscious is a step between Normal Frodo and Wraith Frodo, then the nazgul would have been standing around waiting for Frodo to get back up as a wraith. Whereas if the process was Frodo slowly turning into a wraith with no unconscious step between states, then the Nazgul would have cross the river and Frodo would have joined their side and they would have galloped back to Mordor together.

Aragorn and co may have had a struggle restraining Frodo upon reaching him. Gandalf seems very reluctant to break any new information to Frodo and is observing him very carefully it seems upon Frodo waking up. True he does ask him how he is feeling, but he also isn't forthcoming with all that has happened. The scene to me sort of makes me think of someone who has had a long night of over drinking, next day can't remember anything that happened the night before, and has to resort to someone to tell them everything that happened.

Frodo presumably did not go full wraith, because I guess if Elrond could just unwraith people then they wouldn't be so concerned about it. But I was just wanting to point out that Frodo's narration and his memory ends at a certain point, and we rely on Gandalf to fill in the blanks. Gandalf being an unreliable narrator who deliberately hides information from Frodo in order to prevent his mind becoming overcome with fear.
The narrator doesn't fill in the blanks either, which Sam could have easily done if he witnessed what happened after Frodo "fell". Sam not wanting to fill in the blank could explain why the narrator doesn't say "Frodo collapsed. Glorfindel and Aragorn arrived, picked up Frodo, and they continued their journey into Rivendell."
(
Although counter point to this is that the same thing happened when Frodo did faint after getting stabbed by the Witch King)

It is more likely that Frodo did just faint, but I think cinematically it could be an interesting scene to play out the other way.

Sidenote-
It has been pointed out in LOTRO that suicide is a form a transport. I wonder if the Nazgul might consider it the same way?
Witch King-"It will take so long to get back to Mordor by horse. Or...I could walk off this mountain and then my spirit will fly straight there..."
 
What if Frodo was possessed by the evil of the Nazgûl blade and Elrond had to perform an exorcism? Imagine Frodo levitating off the bed, cursing, head spinning, and projectile vomiting while Elrond splashes him with holy cordial and shouts “the power of Elbereth compels you!”.

:eek:
 
It's certainly an interesting possibility that Frodo babbled and Gandalf put events together, but we shouldn't simply discount Gandalf's words. There's a big difference between protecting Frodo by omitting troubling information during his recovery and outright lying to him. Faramir later claims that he would not deceive even an orc with a falsehood, and I imagine that Gandalf would hold himself to the same standard.

We also have significant evidence in the text that the bearers of the Three, at the very least, have significant powers over the mind. Galadriel reads the minds of the fellowship at Caras Galadhon; Gandalf, Galadriel and Elrond all speak mind-to-mind during the journey north after Aragorn's marriage to Arwen.

I think we should avoid discounting the literal meaning of the text unless we have strong evidence that the information is unreliable. In this case, I think the best reading is that Gandalf's words are literally true. He read Frodo's mind while Frodo slept.
 
The only point against this is that if Gandalf had the power to outright read peoples minds then why did he not read Gollum's mind instead of his interrogating?

The only things I can think of are perhaps that A) Gollum's mind was too complex and old. It was filled with thousands of years of eating fish and living in the dark, it may have been very unpleasant for Gandalf to have gone into his mind.
B) Gandalf can only do his mind reading while the other is asleep. I don't recall the text ever recounting Gollum sleeping.
and C) would be that Gandalf did read Gollum's mind but refrained from telling Frodo about his use of magic because even though Frodo was a friend, the hobbits still are generally unfavourable towards magic.

The annoying thing is that this is basically the only instance of Gandalf performing the feat. Although it has been said that with Pippin it is possible he was doing his mind reading thing then, it was also possible he was just assessing Pippin's honesty.
 
The only point against this is that if Gandalf had the power to outright read peoples minds then why did he not read Gollum's mind instead of his interrogating?

That's a good question. I have a guess, which is somewhat in line with your proposal A. Gollum spent 500 years building up an ability to be sneaky and secretive. It's gotten to the point that keeping secrets has become second nature to him. I believe it's Faramir who later describes Gollum as having locked doors within his mind. That might be enough to prevent Gandalf from easily reading the truth from his mind.

Having said that, I do regard it as possible that some sort of mind reading might have been involved in piecing together the truth of events out of Gollum's lies and dissembling.
 
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