A NOTE ON A NAME

There was King Froði, under whose reign a gold ring could lie on the ground and nobody would take it. Trotter seemed an unsettling diminishment of a powerful character, hardly appropriate for the tall, sardonic authority figure who knows all about Frodo and his errand, is tight with Gandalf and crossways with Bill Ferny, who takes over the narrative with the wave of a finger and steers the quest to Rivendell. [...]I do suggest that he, like any educated Englishman, had some knowledge of Border history, a history, moreover, that had a close resemblance to the immediate back-story of The Lord of the Rings, the unending guerilla action that we are told Strider/Aragorn has been fighting for many years, riding under many different names with the Rohirrim and the Dûnedain in their struggle against Mordor. Christopher Tolkien has explored this thoroughly, and his extended discussion in The Return of the Shadow is well worth reading as a road-map of Tolkien's creative process at work in all its sprawling and overlapping glory.