But, he kept the Strider also in a way. He established that his line would be the House of Telcontar and Telcontar is Strider in Quenya.
Your welcome on the Merry bit.
Also a big funeral for Theoden, which is of course another kind of party.
In modern language, i think Frodo has PTSD, and couldn’t really return to his old life. That was a common problem for soldiers in WWI ("shell shock? I think that’s what they called it) and i kinda think that’s what inspired Frodo’s um, retirement.
I always took it as the unquenchable yearning for the now-destroyed ring that was the fate of any long-term bearer of the One Ring. Such a person could never feel true contentment, only loss.
I think @puzzlegal is correct that Frodo’s condition was both similar to, and inspired by, real-world PTSD/shell-shock; but I think you’re correct that Frodo’s condition was unique to him, as one who had carried the Ring for so long, who had worn it, and who had been stabbed by the Nazgul’s Morgul-knife.
In before the 203 naysayers (kidding) yet it is. I have issues here and there. I read the Hobbit + LotR after seeing the Bakshi movie. Then the Silmarillion came out in paperback even though I lost attention in Akallbeth I read the books again. Then I read The Silmarillion. And the books. Four times. And though I didn’t read the Sil+Hobbit+LotR again I read Unfinished Tales then the HoME stuff.
In terms of world creation, interesting characters, dialogue and epic-ness nothing comes close.
ETA: I have Alexa turn on a lamp at sunset and if I am there I always say “Aurë entuluva!”
Yes, I didn’t mean to say that Frodo doesn’t also have unique condition from being the ring bearer, but i think the inspiration was PTSD, and there are a lot of similarities.
The books don’t much entertain me as they get so bogged down in exposition and world-building that I missed most of what makes the story work. It all seems so dry and mechanical.
For example, until I watched the movies, I didn’t realize how many funny parts there were. Totally missed the thing about Gimli having a crush on Galadriel. Likewise I missed a lot of the emotional valence about “light the beacons”, “fly, you fools”, “I am no man”, etc.
Not that it was missing from the book, but I get exhausted processing the backstory about the 8th son of the 12th daughter of Glimrad the 2nd Usurper in the dawn of the 3rd age. I spent too much time trying to figure out where Tom Bombadil figures into things, and lo and behold, the film demonstrated that he’s not really important. I was tempted to skip past him in the book, but with Tolkien you never know what might be important later. So I appreciate the films for boiling it down to its 9-hour essence.
Gimli was mighty pissed about going to Lothlorien and being the only one who’d he hooded to make it to Caras Galadon - and he was ready to fight and the Elves ready drop him where he stood. Aragaorn, ever the diplomat and linguist said we’d all go in hooded.
It did sorta come out of nowhere that Gimli had was crushing on Galadriel. Though some say he rather had a close affection for Legolas. I believe in the books the request for locks of her hair was A Really Big Ask, yet she was like no problemo (in Quenya).
Still the prettiest. 
I agree.
The description of Frodo having one of his attacks struck me as very similar to one of Dorothy L Sayers’s accounts of Lord Peter Wimsey having a shell shock attack, in one of her earliest Wimsey books, written a few years after WWI.
And Wimsey was helped through the attack by Bunter, his former batman, who had gone through the hell of the trenches with Wimsey.
Sayers and Tolkien were probably both inspired by being in that post-war era, when shell-shock survivors was something that people in Britain were having to deal with.
Tolkien served in the war, and was at the Battle of the Somme. He personally knew a lot of shell-shock survivors.
He was invalided due to trench fever, and apparently had relapses for some years afterward. Frodo’s bouts of illness bore more than a passing resemblance to Tolkien’s own experience.
Yeah - as he said at some point, the wound never really got better.
And I think simply having carried the ring for so long would be sufficient, as Bilbo went along on the boat, and it was implied that Sam might do so, some day, since he too carried the ring however briefly.
Yeah, it was shell shock in WWI, then, it was battle fatigue in WWII.
The same article goes on to say,
The use of “speculative fiction” in the sense of expressing dissatisfaction with traditional or establishment science fiction was popularized in the 1960s and early 1970s by Judith Merril, as well as other writers and editors in connection with the New Wave movement. However, this use of the term fell into disuse around the mid-1970s.[33]
In the 2000s, the term came into wider use as a convenient collective term for a set of genres. However, some writers, such as Margaret Atwood, who wrote The Handmaid’s Tale, which is a feminist piece of speculative fiction, continue to distinguish “speculative fiction” specifically as a “no Martians” type of science fiction, “about things that really could happen.”[34]
Speculative fiction is also used as a genre term that combines different ones into a single narrative or fictional world such as “science fiction, horror, fantasy…[and]…mystery”.[35]
Like league – the distance measurement – the term is fluid depending on who and when you ask.