Oh, there was one thing I wanted to ask you: you've stated before that Frodo would have been powerful enough to be challenge Sauron if he kept the ring.
I don't think I quite said that Frodo could have effectively challenged Sauron if he'd kept the Ring at that point on Mount Doom. But I've said that he might have given Sauron (
sans Ring] a run for his money if he'd actually had time to grow accustomed to
using the Ring. As it is I think the Nazgul would have had a short unhappy lifed if they'd tried to take it from him by force. In the end I think that Sauron would have been obliged to come and take it from Frodo himself, and while I think he'd win, I also think he'd have to
work for his victory.
Why? There was nothing in the book (as I recall) or the film to give the impression that any hobbit, or Frodo in particular, could be so powerful. Gollum is the end result of a hobbit with prolonged exposure to the ring.
The Ring's potential less to do with one's species than with one's person. Sauron may have originally been as powerful as he was due to the kind of being he was (a Maia, one of Tolkein's angelic servants of the One), but when he forged the One Ring he had to transfer much of his native power into the object, in order to be able to control the wearers of the lesser rings. Once he did that he made it possible for
any sentient being who wore the Ring to add that power to whatever native power that creature already had.
That's why people like Aragorn are a threat to Sauron and why capture of the Ring is as important to him as its destruction is to his enemies. As long as the Ring remains lost, Sauron is almost literally a shadow of his former self. But as long as it is lost his
material power and sway over men is such that he can assemble a conventional army that will allow him to destroy his enemies. If a leading figure among his enemies (Aragorn, Denethor perhaps, certainly Elrond or Galadriel or Gandalf) were to find it and master it, they could defeat Sauron's armies and kill his current body - leaving him to face another several centuries of slowly taking physical form again while his enemy became the new Dark Lord and consolidated his power.
But lesser figures, like Boromir or Eomer or Sam Butterbur, despite being just as Human as Aragorn, could no more defeat Sauron than could Merry or Pippin. Nor could most of the Elves. It is even doubtful that Radagast the Brown, wizard though he was, could have used the Ring as anything like the weapon it had the potential to be. Their
selves are somehow smaller, and the Ring bestows power according to the stature of its bearer. It bestows the most power is bestowed on the wise, the learned and the extraordinary - regardless of species.
Frodo is an extraordinary Hobbit, even moreso than his mentor Bilbo. Scholar, Elf-Friend, pupil of a Wizard, seeker-out of wanderers and strangers from beyond the borders of the insular Shire. The whole of his journey is one continuous education and period of personal growth. His ordeal in Morder paradoxically makes his spirit stronger, even as it ravages his body. When he says "I do not choose to do this thing; the Ring is mine" he means it in a way that Gollum doesn't and can't, because Frodo knows what the Ring is. And he has grown to the point where he can actually do something with it. (This growth - the sense in which Frodo grows progressively more Elf-like as the story progresses - also accounts in part for his later passage to the West.)
Gollum, by contrast, was a small, mean soul even when he was more like a hobbit. (Gandalf never says that Smeagol's people
were hobbits, by the way, only that they were "of hobbit kind" who may have split off from the main hobbit line in the days of "the father's of the father's of the Stoors." The hobbits themselves, after all, are divided into three "types".)
Smeagol was a sneak, a gossip, an eavesdropper and a petty theif
before he murdered Deagol. The Ring did not
make Smeagol evil. It amplified his existing tendencies. It mostly corrupted him in the sense that it added an obsessive lust for the Ring itself to his already nasty tendencies, it didn't turn him evil all by itself. Gollum as we see him is not so much a result of the Ring's direct action as it is a by-product of the Ring's natural ability to extend the life of the wearer. It is centuries of living the wretched life Gollum had made for himself, not some alchemy of the Ring, that reduces him to the thin, mad, grapsing thing that Bilbo and Frodo encounter. (He is not improved by his experiences after the lust for the Ring finally drives him out from beneath the mountains in pursuit of Bilbo and he is captured and questioned first by Sauron, then by Aragorn and Gandalf, and then imprisoned by elves of Mirkwood.)
If hobbits have a quality about them that sets them apart from others in relation to the Ring it is not an inability to use it or tendency to be physically twisted by it, but rather an unusal
resistance to its lure. Gollum is not driven totally mad by its loss, does not immediately kill himself in despair. Bilbo actually gives it up voluntarily (albeit with help and encouragement from Gandalf) - a moment virtually unique in the long history of the Ring. And because he has a "good heart", he takes "little hurt" from the Ring, despite having it and using it frequently for many years. (Gollum, by contrast, almost never used the Ring once he was settled in his pool beneath the mountains. In the utter darkness there invisibility was no advantate.)
Frodo does the nearly miraculous. He carries the Ring into Mordor, almost never wears it, and
doesn't march it straight to Barad'dur and hand it over - which has to be what the Ring is urging him to do so close to its master, so much under the almost gravitational pull of Sauron.
Sam also resists this pull. Sam only carries the Ring very briefly, and uses it only once or twice. He is mostly protected by the fact that his only obession is saving Frodo. But in the book, when Sam puts on the Ring, he has a vision of himself, sword in hand, putting the Shire to rights and overcoming Ted Sandyman and his mill, finally becoming
The Gardner of the Shire. That is Sam's idea of omnipotence, and the limit of his vision. If Sam could imagine that, think about what wrongs the deeply moral and deeply learned Frodo might think himself capable of righting - including Sauron's several personal attempts to have Frodo murdered. But Sam also recognizes that "that's where it would
start" and realizes it wouldn't end there. Again, even Sam (who has also grown on the journey) can see a vision of power. Gollum's version of this vision is one where he is
The Gollum (not Smeagol) and has all the fishes he wants and where the nasty hobbit is punished. Small minds, small dreams, small power. Sam, most realistic about himself as always, realizes the limits of his dream and the danger of its becoming a nightmare. And when the time come he emulates Bilbo in voluntarily handing over the Ring to another. (If anything earns Sam a place in a ship to the West it is this act, just as Bilbo's mercy in sparing Gollum when he might have killed him earns him the "reward" of little harm from the Ring and the chance to rest and heal in the Undying Lands.)
Anyway, that was my thinking in coming to the conclusion that by the end Frodo had become the kind of formidable being who might have genuinely challenged Sauron - although without time to truly master the Ring he could not possibly have beaten him, or even fought him for very long.
Regards,
Joe
My point in reply to GKE was that Theoden was not so naming her his heir in place of Eomer, and that Eomer, having survived the war, would certainly become king. 
