Discuss Carpenter #192: Letter from J.R.R. Tolkien to Amy Ronald on 27 July 1956

Frodo deserved all honour because he spent every drop of his power of will and body, and that was just sufficient to bring him to the destined point, and no further. Few others, possibly no others of his time, would have got so far. The Other Power then took over: the Writer of the Story (by which I do not mean myself, 'that one ever-present Person who is never absent and never named' [fn1] (as one critic has said). See Vol. I p. 65. [2] A third (the only other) commentator on the point some months ago reviled Frodo as a scoundrel (who should have been hung and not honoured), and me too.