Fiction, and indeed real life, brims over with important folks without the full compliment of digits.  Here’s ten of them.  Alright, nine.

Frodo Baggins

The villain of the Lord of the Rings, Frodo Baggins, is immortalised by the bards as ‘Frodo of the Nine Fingers.’  The hero of the story, Gollum, is forced to chew off Frodo’s ring finger, nobly sacrificing himself to destroy the One Ring, after Frodo tries to claim it and usher in a new age of darkness over Middle Earth.  It’s a bleak and savage ending but, hey, who gets what they deserve?

Jesse James

The notorious Missouri outlaw is said to have accidently blown off the end of his left middle finger while cleaning his pistol during the American Civil War.  After his murder by Robert Ford, the fact that his body was photographed with the right hand apparently hiding this identifying feature sparked rumours that he was a stand-in, and that James had in fact survived.  He hadn’t.

Davos Seaworth

One of A Song of Ice and Fire’s best loved characters, the so called Onion Knight was once an infamous smuggler, but risked his life to bring food to the besieged Stannis Baratheon.  After the siege was lifted, Stannis knighted Davos as a reward.  Not strictly nine-fingered, but he certainly doesn’t have all ten, as Stannis also ordered the ends of all the fingers on his left hand cut off as punishment for the smuggling.  He now wears the bones in a bag round his neck.  A hard man to please, that Stannis…

Scotty

Original Star Trekker James Doohan lost a middle finger in heroic action during the Normandy landings.  Efforts were made on the show to conceal the injury, including frequent use of a hand-double at the transporter controls, but in his guest appearance in The Next Generation episode, “Relics”, the missing digit was briefly visible.

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