In sparing Gollum, though justice and self-preservation would have excused his killing, Frodo brought about the circumstances that ultimately save him, and all of Middle-earth. “But for him, Sam, I could not have destroyed the Ring,” says Frodo, “the Quest would have been in vain, even at the bitter end.”
In a letter to a reader who commented on Frodo’s “failure”, Tolkien explicitly tied Frodo’s decision to spare Gollum to his own faith. He shared a belief in a “double-scale” which requires one to strive for utmost morality even as one must take pity on others for their moral failings, and the importance of exercising mercy.
“[Simple minds] do not perceive the complexity of any given situation in Time, in which an absolute ideal is enmeshed. They tend to forget that strange element in the World that we call Pity or Mercy, which is also an absolute requirement in moral judgement (since it is present in the Divine nature). In its highest exercise it belongs to God. For finite judges of imperfect knowledge it must lead to the use of two different scales of ‘morality’. To ourselves we must present the absolute ideal without compromise, for we do not know our own limits of natural strength (+grace), and if we do not aim at the highest we shall certainly fall short of the utmost that we could achieve. To others, in any case of which we know enough to make a judgement, we must apply a scale tempered by ‘mercy’: that is, since we can with good will do this without the bias inevitable in judgements of ourselves, we must estimate the limits of another’s strength and weigh this against the force of particular circumstances.”
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