Month: June 2025

“Frodo Wouldn’t Have Got Far Without Sam, Would He Dad?” Frodo Thinks About the Place of Sam Gamgee in His Story and About Both of Them in The Great Tale.

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The Two Towers by J.R.R Tolkien (Harper Collins 1991, 2007) pp. 931-935

Frodo and Sam have come a long way since Gandalf unceremoniously pulled Sam by the ear through the study window at Bag End. And they have travelled far since Frodo’s attempt to escape from all his friends across the Anduin to the Emyn Muil after Boromir’s betrayal and his attempt to take the Ring from Frodo by force. At that point in the story Frodo greeted Sam’s heroic effort to catch up with him, risking his life in the waters of the mighty river, with the words:

“Of all the confounded nuisances you are the worst, Sam!”

The road from the breaking of the Fellowship to the place just below the tunnel into Mordor in the pass of Cirith Ungol has only been a few days but during that time the bonds of friendship between Frodo and Sam have begun to grow deep. Frodo takes the opportunity using the gentle game that he and Sam are playing as Sam imagines Frodo as a character in the kind of story that he loved to hear when he was a child to express something of how he has come to feel about him.

“Why, Sam,” he said, “to hear you somehow makes me as merry as if the story was already written. But you’ve left out one of the chief characters: Samwise the stouthearted. ‘I want to hear more about Sam, dad. Why don’t they put in more of his talk, dad? That’s what I like. it makes me laugh. And Frodo wouldn’t have got far without Sam, would he, dad?'”

This short speech displays much of the struggle that men have to say what they really feel. It is the last sentence that gets closest to this for Frodo. “I wouldn’t have got very far without you, Sam.” But this shy expression of feeling is wrapped up in teasing and in all the careful formality of relationships between classes that typified the early twentieth century world that Frodo and Sam live in and which they carry into the pre-modern heroic world of the central narrative of The Lord of the Rings. And in passing we might note here how seemingly effortless this travel between worlds is. We hardly notice that that all this conversation about heroic literature takes place in a lighthearted conversation between an officer and his batman (a servant to an officer in the British military) on the front line during the Great War of 1914-18. Are we in the trenches of that terrible conflict or are we in the story of Beren and Lúthien from the First Age of Arda? In fact we are in both stories but most importantly of all, the heroic tale recounted in The Silmarilion is legitimately brought into the twentieth century conversation and re-enchants it.

Sam is the first to point this out, speaking of the tale of Beren and Lúthien.

“But that’s a long tale, of course, and goes on past the happiness and into grief and beyond it- and the Silmaril went on and came to Eärendil. And why sir, I never thought of it before! We’ve got some of the light of it in that star-glass that the Lady gave you! Why, to think of it, we’re in the same tale still! Its going on. Don’t the great tales never end?”

Some may recall that Bilbo used words very much like this in his despairing cry of, “Don’t adventures ever have an end?” in the hall of fire in Rivendell when he met Frodo there. Both the tragedy and comedy of life come down to each of us from the ancient stories and we must inherit them both. The point is, and Tolkien vividly brings this to life here, is that our lives in modernity are not hermetically sealed against the heroic tales of the past. They still live in us and we in them.

“You May Know, or Guess, What Kind of a Tale it is… But The People in It Don’t Know. And You Don’t Want Them To.” Frodo Speaks About The Best Kind of Stories.

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The Two Towers by J.R.R Tolkien (Harper Collins 1991, 2007) pp. 930-935

“I wonder what sort of a tale we’ve fallen into?” asks Sam as he and Frodo rest after their climb up the stairs of Cirith Ungol. We thought about this last time and compared the story of Frodo and Sam to that of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, about how Cervantes’ famous characters found themselves in a story that largely came about because Don Quixote had immersed himself for years in tales of medieval chivalry until what he found there became preferable, more real, than what he saw around him in 17th century Spain.

Sam recognises that he and Frodo are in a story. The story is different from the life that he had lived while tending the gardens of Bag End, a story that Sam had come to regard as just a little dull and mundane; a little too predictable. The stories that Sam had learned from Bilbo of Elves and of great heroes were so much more exciting than the every day reality in which he lived. Frodo too was caught up by a longing to go after Bilbo in his discussion with Gandalf in his study in Bag End, a longing that for a moment was greater than the fear that had gripped him when Gandalf told him of the true nature of Bilbo’s ring and of how Sauron was looking for it.

It all felt very different when the question was asked at the Council of Elrond in Rivendell as to who should carry the Ring to Mount Doom and destroy it there. By that point Frodo had suffered the terrible wound inflicted upon him by the Lord of the Nazgûl. Most of his journey to Rivendell had been as a battle field casualty carried on the back of Bill the Pony. If Frodo had ever been caught up with the romance of adventure by the time he had accepted the task of bearing the Ring to Mordor this was long gone by this point.

But Frodo still has the capacity to have his imagination awakened by Sam. When Sam asks what of tale they have landed in Frodo wants to respond, to follow Sam’s train of thought.

“I wonder,” said Frodo. “But I don’t know. And that’s the way of a real tale. Take any one that you’re fond of. You may know, or guess, what kind of a tale it is, happy-ending or sad-ending, but the people in it don’t know. And you don’t want them to.”

I keep on going back to this image. By this point in the story Sam no longer cares about what kind of story he is in. He is guided by his love for Frodo and the need to finish the job.

We don’t want the characters in a story to know how it is going to end because if they did it would spoil the story. It is the very fact that the heroes in our favourite stories don’t know how the story is going to end, and that they keep on going, that makes them the heroes that they are. And in this regard they are completely different in spirit to Sauron. Sauron, by the time we reach this point in the story, has spent three ages in the history of Arda trying to achieve absolute control and to eliminate any unpredictability from all reality. At first he is a servant of Morgoth and then after his master falls at the end of the First Age, he becomes the Dark Lord. But in all this time what he seeks to achieve is power, both over others and over reality itself. Sauron wants to know how the story ends and he exercises all his power to achieve that end. He makes Mordor impregnable against attack and assembles an army so great that even after the defeat at the Pelennor Fields his power is not greatly diminished.

Every reader of The Lord of the Rings is aware of the great irony here. Sauron is convinced that he is in a story that is about power. As a consequence he spends two ages of history trying to amass as much power as possible. That is why he forged the Rings of Power. That is why he is convinced that the one thing he needs is to regain the greatest of those rings. And that is why all his schemes are fatally flawed. In trying to eliminate all uncertainty from the story, in trying to make everything his story, he falls, because stories do not work that way. Frodo and Sam don’t want the characters in the best stories to know how the story is going to end because that will spoil the story. They know that what makes a good story is that very element of uncertainty. And the wonder is that this very element is what makes reality. Frodo and Sam don’t know how their story is going to end. They don’t know if it will have a happy ending. They have “fallen into” this story. They haven’t written it themselves. But in giving themselves up to the uncertainty of their story they allow a deeper reality, one that Sauron has long ago rejected, to do its work.

“I Wonder What Sort of a Tale We’ve Fallen Into?” Sam Gamgee Continues to Think About His and Frodo’s Experience.

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The Two Towers by J.R.R Tolkien (Harper Collins 1991, 2007) pp. 930-935

When I first read Sam’s thoughts about the ancient tales that were to be recorded in The Silmarilion, tales such as that of Beren and Lúthien and their journey to Thangorodrim to wrest a Silmaril from Morgoth’s iron crown they meant nothing to me beyond the lines that I had read of The Lay of Beren and Lúthien in the first book of The Lord of the Rings when Aragorn recounted the story to the hobbits in the camp below Weathertop. I had no idea that these words related to a work upon which Tolkien had spent most of his adult life, the creation of a legendarium within which The Lord of the Rings played just a part.

I did not know these stories but Sam did; and so did Frodo. These characters that Tolkien created came to the early readers of The Lord of the Rings with inner lives that had been formed in a way that no others ever had been in an imaginary work. So as Sam spoke of the story of Beren and Lúthien to Frodo both of them could picture the characters in their mind’s eye and both of them knew what had led those characters to make the journey to Thangorodrim and to achieve the impossible task that lay before them.

See Alan Lee’s wonderful evocation of the journey of Beren and Lúthien to Thangorodrim that is on the front cover of Christopher Tolkien’s edited version of his father’s writings of that story.

It is not possible within this limited space to recount the whole of this story. You will need to read it either within The Silmarilion or in Beren and Lúthien, both of which were lovingly and masterfully prepared for publication from his father’s writings by Christopher Tolkien. There you will read the story that holds such an important place within the imagination that Frodo and Sam both share.

If you do decide to do this then you might come to the conclusion that Sam has become a little too full of himself. Who does he think that he is to compare himself to such an heroic figure such as Beren? Of course the point is that he is not comparing himself with the great hero of old. It is Frodo of whom he is speaking.

“I wonder if we shall ever be put into songs or tales. We’re in one, of course; but I mean: put into words, you know, told by the fireside, or read out of a great big book with red and black letters, years and years afterwards. And people will say: ‘Let’s hear about Frodo and the Ring!”

As far as Sam is concerned, his part in the story is not particularly important. He is a kind of Sancho Panza to Don Quixote as his master travels about Spain engaged in adventures of medieval chivalry. His task is simply to look after his master and not to do anything that is particularly heroic himself.

Now the adventures of Don Quixote, and his faithful servant, Sancho Panza, in Miguel de Cervantes’ tale, bare some similarity to Frodo and Sam’s. If Sam knew Cervantes’ story he would almost certainly think of himself as a figure like Sancho Panza. But Frodo is no Don Quixote. His adventures are not illusory. He does not tilt at windmills imagining them to be knights at a medieval joust. His task is deadly serious. He has been given an impossible journey to undertake. One upon which the whole world depends. The likelihood is that neither he nor Sam will survive, either to tell the tale or to hear it told.

And there is one thing more. Sancho Panza’s role in his story was to keep his master from getting into too much trouble and to patch things up after they got a little too out of hand. Sam is a hero in his own right and Frodo recognises this, even if he speaks of it here in humorous tones.

“To hear you somehow makes me as merry as if the story was already written. But you’ve left out one of the chief characters: Samwise the stouthearted.”

Frodo speaks in this way because he wants to deflect attention from himself. In fact from both of them. As far as he is concerned he is no hero. Just as Sam puts it he has fallen into a story in which he has no right to be and he wishes that it could simply be done with. But his heart has been cheered by Sam and by the story to which Sam has referred. He is ready to go on and to walk into the darkness with some sense that his journey has meaning.

“Adventures, as I Used to Call Them.” Sam Gamgee Ponders the True Nature of Adventure Before the Hobbits Try to Enter the Nameless Land.

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The Two Towers by J.R.R Tolkien (Harper Collins 1991, 2007) pp.928-935

I doubt whether a tour of Mordor would ever be a commercial success. Imagine it being sold something like this.

The adventure of a lifetime. In fact it will probably end your life. The chances that you will return alive are very small and the guide we will provide will do his best, either to kill you himself or to have you killed by a savage monster of terrible potency. So what’s stopping you from signing up?”

Perhaps a small number of adrenaline junkies might be prepared to take on the odds but most of us want to come back from our holidays, alive and in one piece.

It is in a moment of calm after the long climb up the stairs of Cirith Ungol and before they enter the tunnel that lies between them and Mordor, the Nameless Land as Tolkien calls it here, Sam reflects upon all that he and Frodo have experienced together upon their journey. It has been a long way from Bag End and when we compare the Sam that we first met there as Gandalf hauled him through the window of Frodo’s study by his ear we might say that the inner journey that Sam has taken has been even longer.

As they take a few moments of rest after their long climb Frodo expresses his dislike for their surroundings. “Earth, air and water all seem accursed. But so our path is laid,” he says. And then Sam responds with a speech of great beauty.

“Yes, that’s so… And we shouldn’t be here at all, if we’d known more about it before we started. But I suppose it’s often that way. The brave things in the old tales and songs, Mr. Frodo: adventures, as I used to call them. I used to think that they were things the wonderful folk of the stories went out and looked for, because they wanted them, because they were exciting and life was a bit dull, a kind of a sport, as you might say. But that’s not the way of it with the tales that really mattered, or the ones that stay in the mind.”

The tales that matter

“The tales that really mattered, or the ones that stayed in the mind.” Sam is looking back on the years of his childhood when he would sit at the feet of Bilbo Baggins at Bag End. It is hard to imagine the Gaffer being a repository of stories unless they were ones of family history. He was more a storehouse of pithy sayings, all of which were intended to be the last word on any subject. Sam certainly remembers these, usually when he becomes aware that what he is doing would meet with his father’s disapproval, but the stories that Bilbo told were a different matter altogether. They opened doors into worlds of wonder and enchantment in Sam’s heart and mind. And they awoke desire there. Sam expressed that desire in the words, “I want to see Elves!”, a desire that was quickly satisfied in his journey in the meeting with Gildor Inglorien and his company while still in the Shire. Frodo asked him then whether he wished to continue now that his longing had been fulfilled and Sam responded by speaking of the need to see something through. We can only imagine that he returned to thoughts of resolution many times in his journey because he speaks in a similar way here.

“I expect that they had lots of chances, like us, of turning back, only they didn’t. And if they had, we shouldn’t know, because they’d have been forgotten. We hear about those as just went on.”

Carl Jung, the great map maker of the human psyche, spoke of this in these terms. “To this day God is the name by which I designate all things which cross my wilful path violently and recklessly, all things which upset my subjective views, plans and intentions and change the course of my life for better or worse.”

Sam’s language is very different from Jung’s but they are speaking of the same human experience. Oh, yes, Sam would say, you are speaking of a story that really matters. Oh yes, Carl Jung might reply, I am speaking about God.