Frodo’s age (cont.) & a preview of years

Taro comments, below:

Again? Surely by now you’ve read that book-Frodo wasn’t all that old by hobbit standards. Hobbits normally lived over 100 years compared to our 70; and yes the tweens corresponded to our teens, so that a 33 yo hobbit was the equivalent, physically, our 21 year old.
Yes, I’ll grant that EW was under 21 himself, but I think he did a fair job of playing a mature man.
Frodo, at fifty, would have been about the equivalent of our early 30’s. Most 32 year-olds do not consider themselves middle-aged. But anyway, as you were sort of pointing out, I think that PJ’s much-shortened version of the story kind of pretended that he started out years sooner.

Rankin Bass' Frodo from "Return of the King" (1980)

Without wanting to belabor the point, at the beginning of Frodo’s quest, he is already 20 years beyond his “tweens, as the hobbits called the irresponsible twenties between childhood and coming of age at thirty-three.”  (Fellowship of the Ring p.22)  Arguments about middle age aside,  Frodo certainly is a lot older than an irresponsible child, and still has a sense of tiredness about him- a wearing thin- when he begins his journey. 

This is part of made Bilbo so reluctant to journey in The Hobbit.  At fifty-five, Tolkien definitely refers to Bilbo as older and set in his ways; he describes in The Hobbit that Bilbo had become comfortable in his settings, and

…got something a bit queer in his make-up from the Took side,something that only waited for a chance to come out.  The chance never arrived until Bilbo Baggins was grown up, being about fifty years old or so, and living in the beautiful hobbit-hole built by his father, which I have just described for you, until he had in fact apparently settled down immovably. (p.3; above emphasis is mine)

 

Bilbo Baggins from Rankin Bass' "The Hobbit" (1977)

This goes on into Fellowship of the Ring, where Tolkien and the hobbits of the shire note that even for hobbits, fifty is “the usually more sober age” (p. 46)

So it went on, until his forties were running out, and his fiftieth birthday was drawing near: fifty was a number that he felt was somehow significant (or ominous); it was at any rate at that age that adventure had suddenly befallen Bilbo.  Frodo began to feel restless, and the old paths seemed too well-trodden.  He looked at maps, and wondered what lay beyond their edges: maps made in the Shire showed mostly white spaces beyond its borders. (p. 46)

Tolkien’s Frodo has long held the Tookish side in check, which makes his readiness to volunteer (at the Council of Elrond) to take the Ring to Mordor something that he, at some level, is completely aware that he was meant to do so, as opposed to PJ’s Frodo, where the scene is directed in such a way that Frodo’s decision is reactionary to the chaos around him.   Here’s from the ‘Council of Elrond,’ p. 303 (emphasis is mine):

“A great dread fell on [Frodo], as if he were awaiting the pronouncement of some doom that he had long foreseen and vainly hoped might after all never be spoken…”

(I totally grant, btw, that both versions of Frodo are additionally motivated by a reluctance to give up possession of the Ring.)

I concede, partially, to the comment above, but still must argue that a more experienced and older Frodo provides the character with a level of self-awareness, and even self-sacrifice, that Elijah Wood does not.

On another note (one which I will not explore now), Fran Walsh herself acknowledges that Tolkien would likely have not approved of the younger age of Frodo.  I’ll grab the transcript of the interview when I get home.

On a final note, extended periods of time are important to Tolkien.  We’ll look many examples of where age- old age- is important in the work.  (As it is to this whole Anglo-Saxon lens I’m trying to read it through now.)

And thanks to Taro for holding my feet to the fire on this!