The Fellowship of the Ring by J.R.R Tolkien (Harper Collins 1991) pp 42-44

Please click Play in order to listen to my reading of this post.

It is not necessary to have travelled far in order to have an imagination that extends beyond the boundaries of one’s own lived experience but it is necessary to wish to have done so. On an April evening after a rainy day Sam Gamgee and Ted Sandyman sit opposite one another by the fire of The Green Dragon in Bywater and the regulars of the pub gather about them. They expect a debate between the two hobbits and they are not disappointed.

By the rules of bar room debate Ted Sandyman is more skilled at the art and if a quicker wit were to guarantee success in life then he would have been the happier of the two. There is little doubt that the assembled company consider that Ted is the winner and certainly Ted, himself, thinks so, but Sam will end his days honoured by all and Ted…?

We never find out what happened to Ted after Saruman’s gang is driven out of the Shire. The last time that we hear of him is when the victorious hobbits, fresh from the Battle of Bywater, are marching upon Saruman’s headquarters in Bagshot Row. Ted still regards himself as Sam’s superior even then. “You was always soft,” he sneers at Sam and even when he sees the hobbit host he still believes that his horn will summon a force of men sufficient to put down the uprising.

Of course the men would never come so what happened to Ted after that? There are two possibilities. The first and the most hopeful is that after a lifetime of small-minded mean spiritedness Ted comes to realise what a fool he has been and that he realises too that to think of oneself as a fool is not the worst fate that can befall a person. Indeed it can open the door to happiness. Ted could lay down the burden of what he considers to be his dignity, something that he has always regarded as more important than happiness, seek to make amends for the harm that he has done to others, and to put his mill to use in the service of the Shire at a difficult time. If he were to do that he would almost certainly find that his fellow hobbits would be quick to forgive and he would live out his days as a useful and contented member of his community.

That is one possibility. The other would be that he would retreat into his last remaining possession, his resentment, and nourish it as if it had the ability to feed him. He would hate Merry and Pippin as entitled members of the old gentry of the Shire, a class from which he has always felt himself to be excluded, and he would hate Sam even more because he would see Sam as having achieved the thing that he had always desired himself but now could not have. If he chose the latter pathway would he be able to remain in his mill, serving a community who knew what he had done as an enthusiastic collaborator and whose contentment he would always hate? Or would he, like Bill Ferny, have withdrawn to the edges of things to eke out a miserable existence through small, mean and nasty acts.

I will allow my readers to decide this for themselves. For myself, just as Frodo did with Lotho Pimple even after he saw the destruction of his own home, I will hope for Ted Sandyman. Frodo continued to hope for Lotho, not because he had scaled some moral height, but because of his own sense of failure in not being able to cast the Ring into the Fire. Frodo does not feel alien from his cousin. They have both fallen. Perhaps Sam will not feel alien from his old sparring partner from The Green Dragon. 

But on this April evening after the rain all of this lies in a future beyond events that will change all of their lives. Sam, the hobbit with a ‘soft’ head, will follow his longing to see wonders and he will go with Frodo through terrible hardship unto great glory. While Ted will never see beyond the next successful deal and the next one and the next one until he falls with Lotho Pimple, the hobbit he has most admired, the one who could have written a book about making successful deals.