Ok but like.... why resist temptation? We would love to hear about the significance of frodo's name
Okay fine since you forced my hand.
So Frodo comes from the Old English Froda, which actually means “old,” but with the implication of “old and wise,” specifically with the wisdom that comes from hard experience. It also frequently carries with it the sense of suffering survived, and wisdom gained through that suffering.
It’s not a heroic name, in the traditional warrior-hero sense. It is a king’s name, but it’s the name of a king known for his wisdom, not his prowess in battle. (Actually, the mythical Froda, or one of them at least, was known for the peace of his reign and wasn’t a fighter at all.)
And that’s the thing about Frodo. His character is all about the wisdom that comes through experience and suffering, experience he never asked for but nevertheless took on voluntarily because someone had to do it. And he wanted to save the Shire and he did - at the cost of himself.
Mythically speaking, Frodo is the maimed king, the wounded healer. The Fisher King, if you will, but in reverse: it’s his wound that heals the land. (But not for him. Because as he tells Sam, that’s how it is, when things are in danger. Someone has to give them up, lose them, so that others can keep them.)
I think we often miss this final development of Frodo’s character as a wisdom figure, in part because people can get so focused on the fact that he failed his quest (which he did), and in part because, tbqh, the movies really did him an injustice in this area.
One of my fave scenes in the book is that final confrontation between Frodo and Saruman, when Frodo stops the other hobbits from killing Sharkey, and Saruman says with a furious snarl, “You’ve grown, halfling.” Grown wise, and in Saruman’s opinion cruel, because he’s fallen so far that he can only see mercy as a cruelty. And Saruman mocks Frodo, saying that his wisdom has been bought at a terrible price, that he’ll never be able to live in this Middle-earth again, and…he’s not wrong.
When the hobbits return to the Shire, Sam, Merry, and Pippin all say that it feels like waking up from a strange dream. But Frodo says, “Not for me. For me it feels like falling asleep again.” He has, to put it bluntly, seen too much of the underlying reality of the world, and he can’t go back.
Merry tells Pippin in the Houses of Healing that it’s not possible for Hobbits to live too long on the heights. They must come back to good earth and pipeweed and the simple pleasures of life in order to remain Hobbits.
But Frodo has spent too long on the heights. He has experienced and suffered too much, and the wisdom he’s gained has fundamentally changed him.
And all of that is contained in his name. Froda carries a sense of wisdom, but it’s a wisdom that only comes at the cost of suffering. There’s an inherent melancholy in the name that fits the character perfectly.
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