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“Frodo? What’s evil?”
Frodo stopped in the middle of the story he was telling Pippin, a story passed down from Bilbo that was probably only partly true but was very entertaining. “Excuse me?”
“You said the spider was evil,” Pippin said, staring up at Frodo with his large green eyes as he twisted together a flower crown. “What’s evil?”
It was one of those delightful summer days when both Merry and Pippin had come to Bag End to visit. Now they were all three sitting together in the Bag End garden, with their lunch spread out on a blanket. Well, Frodo and Pippin were sitting together; Merry, who had already eaten, was sprawled out in the grass under the sun and, apparently, paying them no attention whatsoever—as opposed to young Sam, who was ostensibly gardening, but kept getting distracted and simply sitting in the flowerbed with his trowel dangling from one hand, staring raptly at Frodo, until he remembered himself and blushed and turned back to his task.
(Frodo had invited him to join them several times, but Sam insisted the Gaffer wouldn’t approve.)
Frodo smiled at Pippin and reached for his glass of lemonade. “Well, the spider was trying to eat the elves’ home. That’s evil.”
Pippin’s brow scrunched. “Mum says the Sackville-Bagginses are evil.”
Frodo accidentally spat out his mouthful of lemonade. “What?”
“Are they trying to eat your home?” Pippin looked doubtfully at Bag End. “That would take a long time, wouldn’t it?”
“No, Pip,” Frodo laughed, “they’re not trying to eat Bag End. And I don’t think they’re evil, either.”
“So they’re good?”
“Well…” Frodo hesitated. He could hardly agree that the Sackville-Bagginses were good. “No, they’re bad. At least, they’re bad to a lot of people.”
“Evil,” Pippin said determinedly.
“Not evil.”
“Why not? Just ’cause they’re not eating Bag End?”
“Because hobbits aren’t evil, Pippin,” Frodo said seriously. “Evil is reserved for…for evil creatures.”
This answer did not appear to satisfy Pippin in any way. He stopped working on his flower crown. “What makes a creature become evil?”
Frodo was not entirely sure, but he did not want to admit that. “I expect it’s isolation,” he said, trying to sound confident and certain. “Something like the spider that lives away from others and never learns right from wrong.”
Pippin cocked his head. “So the Sackville-Bagginses could be evil if we made them live alone?”
“Erm…I suppose so,” Frodo said awkwardly.
Sam coughed.
Frodo glanced over at him. “Yes, Sam? Something to say?”
Sam blushed vividly. “It’s not my place, sir.”
Frodo resisted the temptation to roll his eyes, knowing Sam would interpret the gesture as aimed at him, and not at society’s limiting expectations. “Go ahead, Sam. I welcome your thoughts.”
“Well, it’s just…” Sam dug at something with his shovel, keeping his eyes down. “What about goblins and the like? As in Mr. Bilbo’s tales? Don’t they live together, whole hordes of ’em? But they’re still evil.”
“Erm…yes, very good point,” Frodo conceded. “It’s just that the goblins were raised in a goblin community and they taught each other wrongly. So that’s how they became evil.”
Pippin’s eyes widened. “That’s why Lotho’s evil!”
“What?”
“His parents taught him wrong!”
Sam nodded enthusiastically.
Oh, dear. “No, listen,” Frodo said desperately. “Lotho is…well…difficult. But he’s not evil. Hobbits aren’t evil creatures, like I said.”
Pippin frowned. “But I don’t understand. Why are some creatures evil and some aren’t? It seems like it’s just about home-eating to me.”
“But goblins don’t eat homes,” Sam contributed, then ducked his head. “Sorry, sirs.”
“No, no,” Frodo said absently. “By all means, Sam, help us stay on track.” He gathered his thoughts. “I was wrong, Pippin. It’s not isolation, and it’s not even being taught the wrong thing. For something to be the wrong thing to be taught assumes first that wrongness is something identifiable in all circumstances, and is not merely one thing in one community and something else in another.”
Pippin looked blankly at him.
Frodo cleared his throat and tried again: “Right and wrong are different from good manners. Good manners vary by community, but even if goblins are taught to behave a certain way in their community, their behavior is still wrong.”
“Because they’re eating people?” Pippin asked knowingly.
“Well, yes, in a way. Because they’re causing harm.”
“By eating people.”
“Yes.” Frodo smiled. “There. Is that settled?”
Pippin bit his lip. He looked suddenly very worried as he fidgeted with his flower crown.
Frodo narrowed his eyes in concern. “Pip?”
Pippin started plucking petals off his flowers and did not look up.
Frodo leaned closer. “Pippin? What’s the matter?”
“Am…” Pippin drew his flower crown up to his mouth to nibble worriedly on one of the stems. “Am I evil?”
Frodo blinked slowly at him. “Um…why would you think that?”
Merry raised his voice: “Because he got in trouble last week for biting me.”
Pippin’s eyes filled with tears. “But I wasn’t trying to eat him!”
“What were you trying for, then?” Merry demanded.
“I was angry,” Pippin mumbled. He looked imploringly at Frodo. “Merry wouldn’t let me play tig ’cause he said I was too little to play with the bigger tweens but I’m tall and I’m fast.”
Frodo glanced at Merry, who shrugged and went back to staring up at the clouds.
“Frodo?” Pippin reached out to tug on his sleeve. “Am I evil?”
“No, Pippin, of course you’re not.”
“But…” Pippin took a deep breath and lowered his voice—or tried to, anyway. He was not very good at whispering and Frodo had no doubt that both Merry and Sam could hear him perfectly well. “But I wanted it to hurt.”
“Yes,” Frodo said patiently, “and that was very wrong of you, but it’s not evil.”
“But what’s the difference?”
“Well, I…I think it’s a matter of scale. Biting your cousin to hurt him is quite different from eating someone’s entire home, or eating an entire person, don’t you see?”
“That’s why hobbits can’t be evil?” Pippin’s head tilted to the other side. “Because we’re too little?”
“Goblins aren’t that much bigger’n us,” Sam pointed out. “D’you reckon, if we all banded together, we could do some real evil?”
“I…” Frodo was quite at a loss. “I…suppose?”
Pippin clapped his hands over his mouth in horror. “So we can be evil!”
Oh, where was Bilbo when he was needed? “Pippin, dear, that’s not something you need to worry about,” he said pleadingly, trying to hide the fact that he was beginning to feel a little worried about this himself.
Pippin started twisting his flower crown into knots. “What if we’re being evil right now and we don’t even know it?”
“We’re not,” Frodo said firmly.
“How do you know?”
“Pippin, come on. We’re sitting in the sunshine talking about stories. That’s…that’s all good,” he insisted.
Pippin looked on the verge of veritable panic. “But what if the evil comes and eats all the good?”
“It—what?” Frodo tried to wrap his head around that. “No, no, evil isn’t some sort of thing that goes around eating good things. Evil isn’t anything. It’s just…the opposite of good. All right?”
Pippin barely appeared to be listening. “What if no one ever tells us and we just get worse and worse until we’re all as bad as goblins?”
“Pippin!” Frodo leaned forward and grabbed his shoulders. “That’s not going to happen.”
“How do you know?”
“Well, because…” Frodo glanced around. Sam was also staring at him, wide-eyed and anxious. “All right. Yes. Maybe hobbits can be evil. But I don’t think the three of us are in any danger.”
“Why not?” Pippin demanded.
Frodo blew out a frustrated breath. “Well, I mean, do you want to go around hurting people all the time? Yes, I know you wanted to hurt Merry when you were angry, but you regret that, don’t you?”
Pippin hesitated.
Frodo raised his eyebrows. “…Don’t you?”
Merry propped himself up on one elbow. “Yes, don’t you?”
“Well, yes,” Pippin mumbled. “I love Merry.” He hesitated again. “But…doesn’t that mean I’m a little evil? Because I did want to hurt him,” he added guiltily, “even just for a little bit.”
Frodo considered this. “I think all of us have done that before, and in fact do it quite often. I suppose, then, that all of us have the potential for a little bit of evil. Perhaps it’s true that no person or creature is evil in essence. At least, not at first. Perhaps we become that way…but only when we stop fighting it,” he added quickly, before Pippin (or Sam) could panic again.
Pippin’s eyes brightened. “So how d’you fight it?”
Frodo began to feel on top of things again. “If evil is wanting to hurt people, what would you say is the opposite of that?” he prompted.
“Wanting to help people!” Pippin said immediately.
“Very good! So if we want to help people, we’re being good, and we’re not being evil.”
Frodo was rather pleased with this conclusion and prepared at this point to return to his story. Pippin, however, began frowning again.
“…Yes?” Frodo asked after a moment of silence.
The crease in Pippin’s forehead deepened. It was apparently quite a difficult concept that he was trying to work out. “What if,” he started to say slowly, “you’re told to help people, but you don’t want to?”
Frodo blinked and tried to figure out where he was going with this. “I suppose you ought to help people anyway. Think of it this way: it’s an opportunity to do good.”
“But if you don’t want to help them, that’s evil?”
“It’s—it’s wrong, yes, but not—”
“But you said evil is the opposite of good!”
Frodo was beginning to get a headache. “…Yes,” he mumbled. “Yes, I suppose that every time you’re told to help people, it…well, it creates the chance to be evil.”
“That’s not good,” Pippin said solemnly.
“That settles it, then!” Merry cried, sitting up. “Chores are evil.”