Given the opposition of Gandalf and Elrond to using the Ring, Frodo may also be overstating the case when he says that he is permitted to wear it. If he failed to ask, it was not because an opportunity to do so was wanting.
For Gandalf had been telling him since the night Bilbo left the Shire seventeen years earlier that he should not use the Ring, as well as pointing out the harmful effects of doing so ( FR 1.i.36, 40 ii.48-49, 53-54 iii.67, 75 x.170) much of the point of the Council of Elrond was that the Ring could not be used ( FR 2.ii.67) and Frodo had also spent over two months in Rivendell with Gandalf.
Is Frodo's question merely an innocent one? Can any such question about the Ring be innocent? His remark that he had 'often meant to ask Gandalf at Rivendell' seems almost disingenuous or - what is perhaps more likely - self-deceived. While that's all quite understandable, I'm not sure that any of these events is more revealing than this one: Frodo asks someone who clearly could use the Ring to devastating effect about using the Ring himself. Our attention in this chapter is usually taken up by events that are far more dramatic: Galdariel's 'testing' of the hearts of the Fellowship at their first meeting the visions Sam and Frodo see in her mirror or Galadriel's eloquent rejection of the Ring just a moment before this.
But it would not stop with that, alas! We will speak no more of it.
