Student Question
Why does Frodo leave on the boat in The Return of the King?
Quick answer:
Frodo left on the boat to leave Middle Earth for Eressëa. Frodo, throughout the course of The Lord of the Rings, suffers greatly, and returns from his quest deeply traumatized. Thus, he is never able to reintegrate into life in the Shire. At the end of the book, he departs to the paradise across the sea to heal that psychological damage.
It is one of the central conceits of Tolkien's larger legendarium that these events exist in a time of transition. The elves, who had long been in a state of decline, were leaving Middle Earth, taking ships back to a paradise across the sea. The Ring-bearers (Bilbo, Frodo, and Sam) are permitted to take that journey themselves. As The Lord of the Rings ends, Frodo and Bilbo take that last journey, while Sam will depart later, long after the events of the book.
Ultimately, you should remember that Frodo returns from his quest to destroy the ring severely traumatized. We see a physical manifestation of his trauma in his recurrent illness but even more severe than his physical suffering are the emotional and psychological scars he bears. Tolkien himself attests to the weight of Frodo's suffering in one of his letters, writing (on the subject of Frodo's failure as a...
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His real contract was only to do what he could, to find a way, and to go as far on the road as his strength of mind and body allowed. He did that. i do not myself see that the breaking of his mind and will under demonic pressure after torment was any more a moral failure than the breaking of his body would have been - say, by being strangled by Gollum, or crushed by a falling rock. (Tolkien, letter 246 to Mrs. Eileen Elgar, September, 1963, from The Letter of J. R. R. Tolkien, ed. Humphrey Carpenter with Christopher Tolkien: Houghton Mifflin Co., New York: originally published: 1995, republished paperback addition, 2000)
These are strong sentiments, which are well reflected in the melancholy tone that becomes particularly strong within the last part of the book. One can see this sense of melancholy present when the Hobbits return to the Shire, only to find that the home they had spent so long trying to safeguard and protect had in the meantime been transformed into something unrecognizable. As Tolkien writes:
This was Frodo and Sam's own country, and they found out now that they cared about it more than any other place in the world. Many of the houses that they had known were missing. Some seemed to have been burned down. The pleasant row of old hobbit-holes in the bank on the north side of the Pool were deserted, and their little gardens that used to run down bright to the water's edge were rank with weeds. Worse, there was a whole line of ugly new houses all along Pool Side, where the Hobbiton Road ran close to the bank. An avenue of trees had stood there. They were all gone. And looking with dismay up the road towards Bag End they saw a tall chimney of brick in the distance. It was pouring out black smoke into the evening air. (Lord of the Rings, book 6, chapter 8: "The Scouring of the Shire")
Of course, at this point, the Hobbits participate in a rebellion, restoring the Shire to much of its earlier beauty and tranquility. However, while this physical damage can be repaired, Frodo's alienation and emotional trauma is much more difficult to counteract. While Sam is able to reintegrate, making a life for himself in the Shire, marrying and building a family, Frodo cannot. As he tells Sam:
But I have been too deeply hurt, Sam. I tried to save the Shire, and it has been saved, but not for me. It must often be so, Sam, when things are in danger: some one has to give them up, lose them, so that others may keep them. But you are my heir: all that I had and might have had I leave to you. (Lord of the Rings, book 6, chapter 9: "The Grey Havens")
Thus, Tolkien himself answers your question in that same letter cited earlier (letter # 246) to Eileen Elgar, from September 1963. Frodo, damaged and traumatized, departs from Middle Earth first and foremost in search of solace and healing. In the professor's own words:
Frodo was sent or allowed to pass over Sea to heal him—if that could be done, before he died. He would have eventually to "pass away": no mortal could, or can, abide for ever on earth, or within Time. So he went both to a purgatory and to a reward, for a while: a period of reflection and peace and a gaining of a truer understanding of his position in littleness and in greatness, spent still in time amid the natural beauty of "Arda Unmarred," the Earth unspoiled by evil. (The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien)