It is a strange and (to the best of my knowledge) unobserved tragedy that one of the greatest failures of the Lord of the Rings is on the part of Sam.
This might seem a little surprising – in recent years, commentary on Sam has been far more focussed on his role as the tale’s “true” hero, the doughty Everymanhobbit without whom the Quest would surely have failed.
Further, the failures of other characters are drawn in far sharper, far clearer lines. Boromir succumbs to the lure of the Ring. Frodo, of course, ultimately fails himself in his errand and duty – a failure that was, according to Tolkien himself, all but inevitable for any person, and yet a failure nonetheless. Other characters, too, fail in less obvious ways. Gandalf berates himself in “The Shadow of the Past” for having not done his due diligence regarding Bilbo’s ring. Pippin succumbs to idle curiosity and greed when he steals the palantir from Gandalf’s care. Gimli and Legolas both, at different points, display prejudice and arrogance (though they do learn to be better!). Denethor sinks into despair and pride, while Théoden has already fallen to indolence and mistrust before Gandalf rouses him. Indeed, for all that I admire the character in general, the story itself is born of Isildur and his own failure.
So, then, when marked with these great sins and grave failings, how does Sam, sweet, humble and loyal Sam, fail? There is an obvious answer, in his ill-treatment of the recovering Sméagol while they travel together – Sam displays impatience, distrust, prejudice and an overall lack of empathy to the wretched Sméagol. But this is an easy enough observation to make, and others have studied it better than I would.
No, I’m rather more interested in how Sam himself considers that he failed the Quest of the Ring. Because I do think that, despite his great deeds and steadfast aid, Sam believed that he had failed the Quest – and that, just as Frodo was left permanently scarred by his ordeal, Sam, too, suffered guilt and shame (whether fairly or no) due to his own shortcomings.
This then obviously leads us to an important matter of definition – what, exactly, was Sam’s mission in LOTR? What was he aiming to achieve or accomplish on the quest? The answer is both simple and obvious – Sam’s true aim was not to destroy the Ring. His aim was to protect his beloved master. To keep Frodo safe. We’re told this by Sam himself as early as Chapter 4:
Well, Sam!’ [Frodo] said. ‘What about it? I am leaving the Shire as soon as ever I can – in fact I have made up my mind now not even to wait a day at Crickhollow, if it can be helped.’
‘Very good, sir!’
‘You still mean to come with me?’
‘I do.’
‘It is going to be very dangerous, Sam. It is already dangerous. Most
likely neither of us will come back.’
‘If you don’t come back, sir, then I shan’t, that’s certain,’ said Sam.
‘Don’t you leave him! they said to me. Leave him! I said. I never mean to. I am going with him, if he climbs to the Moon; and if any of those Black Riders try to stop him, they’ll have Sam Gamgee to reckon with , I said.’
The Lord of the Rings, Book I, Chapter 4, ‘A Shortcut to Mushrooms’, by J.R.R. Tolkien
The first two books of LOTR reinforce this again and again, as Sam accompanies Frodo uninvited to the Council of Elrond, and doggedly chases Frodo down much later as he tries to slip away from the Fellowship when it breaks. Sam, of course, is as invested in destroying the Ring as any of the Free Peoples, but I don’t think it’s why he goes on the Quest – he goes to ensure the safety and security of Frodo.
Indeed, we get the clearest proof of this in the heartbreaking conclusion of Book IV, when Sam, convinced that Frodo has been slain by the demonic Shelob, has just resolved to take on the Ring himself and finish the task, when a patrol of Orcs comes across the seemingly dead body of Frodo and seize his still form while Sam hides.
With a dreadful stroke Sam was wakened from his cowering mood. They had seen his master. What would they do? He had heard tales of the Orcs to make the blood run cold. It could not be borne. He sprang up. He flung the Quest and all his decisions away, and fear and doubt with them. He knew now where his place was and had been: at his master’s side, though what he could do there was not clear. Back he ran down the steps, down the path towards Frodo.
‘How many are there?’ he thought. ‘Thirty or forty from the tower at least, and a lot more than that from down below, I guess. How many can I kill before they get me? They’ll see the flame of the sword, as soon as I draw it, and they’ll get me sooner or later. I wonder if any song will ever mention it: How Samwise fell in the High Pass and made a wall of bodies round his master. No, no song. Of course not, for the Ring’ll be found, and there’ll be no more songs. I can’t help it. My place is by Mr. Frodo. They must understand that – Elrond and the Council, and the great Lords and Ladies with all their wisdom. Their plans have gone wrong. I can’t be their Ring- bearer. Not without Mr. Frodo.’
LOTR, Book IV, Chapter 10, ‘The Choices of Master Samwise’
For the remainder of the chapter, Sam pursues the Orcs, determined to wreak vengeance upon them at the cost of his life and the Ring itself, and this is before he learns the dreadful truth – that Frodo lives.
This may well all seem obvious enough, that Sam’s primary cause in the War of the Ring is the protection of Frodo. And we all know how that ends – Frodo is wounded in body, mind and soul by the Witch-king, by Shelob, by Gollum and ultimately by the Ring itself. He grows in wisdom and mercy, but at great cost – and, ultimately, realises that the victory he has won has been a victory for others and not himself.
‘Where are you going, Master?’ cried Sam, though at last he understood what was happening.
‘To the Havens, Sam,’ said Frodo.
‘And I can’t come.’
‘No, Sam. Not yet anyway, not further than the Havens.’
……………….
‘But,’ said Sam, and tears started in his eyes, ‘I thought you were going to enjoy the Shire, too, for years and years, after all you have done.’
‘So I thought too, once. But I have been too deeply hurt, Sam. I tried to save the Shire, and it has been saved, but not for me. It must often be so, Sam, when things are in danger: some one has to give them up, lose them, so that others may keep them.
LOTR, Book VI, Chapter 9, ‘The Grey Havens’
Frodo’s “and it has been saved, but not for me” is undeniably the best-remembered line from this passage. However, Sam’s anguished declaration that “…I thought you were going to enjoy the Shire, too” is, to me, equally tragic, perhaps even more so. Frodo may personally have failed to destroy the Ring, but the Ring was destroyed nonetheless, through his courage and determination. In this moment, though, Sam realises that his efforts have been in vain – he has failed Frodo and failed himself.
This is not a ‘fair’ take, not a reasonable understanding of the situation. We know that Sam has done all he could (and then some), that none could have done more or better than he did. But Sam is not a fair person, especially as regards himself. And, sadly, we see the proof of this, the proof of how hard Sam is upon himself, in the very text of LOTR – which leads us neatly into the second part of this post.
In LOTR, Tolkien famously makes use of a ‘frame narrative’, presenting the books as if he were not the author of them, but the translator and interpreter – within this fictionalised history, LOTR and The Hobbit are the volumes of the Red Book of Westmarch, a historical Hobbit text written by Bilbo, Frodo and Sam.
The authorship of the Red Book is further able to be traced fairly reliably. Bilbo, clearly, is the sole author of The Hobbit, as evidenced by the text itself – and also by the strikingly different narrative tone of The Hobbit. The narrator of The Hobbit is nearly a character in the story himself, wryly commenting on and poking fun at the hapless Bilbo and the alternately frustrated and bewildered Dwarves. An older, wiser Bilbo, looking back critically yet fondly on his younger and more foolish self.
LOTR, meanwhile, has three distinct authors, and two clear periods of authorship. The bulk of Book I and the first couple of chapters of Book II were almost certainly written in Rivendell by Bilbo and Frodo, following the Council of Elrond and before the Fellowship departed:
…but in the day, while Merry and Pippin were out and about, Frodo and Sam were to be found with Bilbo in his own small room. Then Bilbo would read passages from his book (which still seemed very incomplete), or scraps of his verses, or would take notes of Frodo’s adventures.
LOTR, Book II, Chapter 3, ‘The Ring Goes South’
This matches the tone of Book I in particular, which is generally lighter than Books II-VI, but is also much darker than The Hobbit, and further features a very different narrative tone.
Books II-VI, crucially, were written later, assembled from notes taken in Minas Tirith following the coronation of Aragorn Elessar, and organised and properly set down several months later in the Shire after the death of Sharkey. Frodo is the primary author of most of this text, with input from the other surviving members of the Fellowship (Pippin, Merry and Gimli in particular seem to have been crucial, given how much of books III and V are from their perspective), while Sam is responsible for part of the final chapter, and presumably at least some minor editing and organisational work. But I think Sam may have contributed more to the Red Book than the Red Book itself says he did…perhaps as an author, and even if not, certainly as a contributor and adviser on the events and happenings of the story.
Much of the events of Books IV and VI are told through the eyes of Sam, despite Frodo being present – though the narrative occasionally switches to Frodo’s thoughts, Sam is given the bulk of work as the point of view character. Not exclusively, mind – Frodo’s perspective is also presented. But more often than not, the events of these chapters are shown through the feelings, emotions, and perceptions of Sam.
Often, these are framed as being very practical concerns. Sam’s the one who considers food and rest, who sets camp and cooks, and who worries about their new ‘friend’ Sméagol deciding that the hobbits are food and not friends. But, strung through Sam’s point of view is also a decidedly melancholy, critical tone.
When [Sam] woke up the sky above was dim, not lighter but darker than when they had breakfasted. Sam leapt to his feet. Not least from his own feeling of vigour and hunger, he suddenly understood that he had slept the daylight away, nine hours at least. Frodo was still fast asleep, lying now stretched on his side. Gollum was not to be seen. Various reproachful names for himself came to Sam’s mind, drawn from the Gaffer’s large paternal word-hoard; then it also occurred to him that his master had been right: there had for the present been nothing to guard against. They were at any rate both alive and unthrottled.
LOTR, Book IV, Chapter 2, ‘The Passage of the Marshes
……
It had always been a notion of [Sam] that the kindness of dear Mr. Frodo was of such a high degree that it must imply a fair measure of blindness. Of course, he also firmly held the incompatible belief that Mr. Frodo was the wisest person in the world (with the possible exception of Old Mr. Bilbo and of Gandalf).
LOTR, Book IV, Chapter 3, ‘The Black Gate is Closed’
…….
Sam reeled, clutching at the stone. He felt as if the whole dark world was turning upside down. So great was the shock that he almost swooned, but even as he fought to keep a hold on his senses, deep inside him he was aware of the comment: ‘You fool, he isn’t dead, and your heart knew it. Don’t trust your head, Samwise, it is not the best part of you. The trouble with you is that you never really had any hope. Now what is to be done?’
LOTR, Book IV, Chapter 10
There is a peculiar tone of self-deprecation, of modesty to the point of denigration. It would be possible to read this as being symptomatic partly of Sam’s lower class, and partly as a result of his natural inclinations. However, we also don’t really see this reproachful, disparaging language towards Sam until Book II – in Book I, he’s shown in a slightly less derogatory light.
And Book I was, as we have already established, written after the hobbits reached Rivendell, and before the Quest was completed. Everything else was written after the destruction of the Ring. After Frodo’s suffering and Sam’s failure (even though it be a failure only from Sam’s own perspective) to protect him.
And this in turn surely colours Sam’s perspective on the entire tale, and on his part played in it. Sam’s contributions to the text of LOTR must be filtered through his own personal view and his own biases…..and there is every chance that those biases paint him in a less flattering light, especially given the repeated torments that Frodo suffers, to the point where recovery is all but impossible.
This all seems very straightforward when laid out in this manner, but I am nonetheless fascinated by Tolkien’s use of the frame narrative to portray Sam’s self-perceived inadequacies and shortcomings. It would be all too easy to present this directly within the text, but by rather outlining Sam’s post-war negativity through his own narration, I think the text both becomes more honest and far more profound. It adds an extra dimension of tragedy not only to Sam’s character, but to his biases and perception of himself, and that, to me, is far more sorrowful than if the text outright and explicitly told us how or what he felt. I also think that the fact that these self-criticisms are not necessarily fair or just heightens the sense of guilt that Sam felt after the full extent of Frodo’s suffering became clear.
Sam is unable to see the events of the War of the Ring through any other lens than his own, and is on some level unable to recognise that his is a triumph. And much of this sense of failure is woven through his perspective within the text itself, as presented in its frame narrative context. It is, in short, a tragic and beautiful usage of frame narrative, of biased perspective, and of overall context to provide us with a subtle, raw and honest additional layer of emotional context for one of the chief heroes of LOTR. The fact that Sam succeeded, just as Frodo succeeded, and yet is subsequently equally convinced by his own fallibility and insufficiency makes them both tragic heroes in their own ways, even if Sam’s ‘failings’ are both other from Frodo’s, and are also presented through very different narrative means, in respect of the fictionalised frame narrative concept.
Then Frodo kissed Merry and Pippin, and last of all Sam, and went aboard; and the sails were drawn up, and the wind blew, and slowly the ship slipped away down the long grey firth; and the light of the glass of Galadriel that Frodo bore glimmered and was lost. And the ship went out into the High Sea and passed on into the West, until at last on a night of rain Frodo smelled a sweet fragrance on the air and heard the sound of singing that came over the water. And then it seemed to him that as in his dream in the house of Bombadil, the grey rain-curtain turned all to silver glass and was rolled back, and he beheld white shores and beyond them a far green country under a swift sunrise.
But to Sam the evening deepened to darkness as he stood at the Haven; and as he looked at the grey sea he saw only a shadow on the waters that was soon lost in the West. There still he stood far into the night, hearing only the sigh and murmur of the waves on the shores of Middle-earth, and the sound of them sank deep into his heart. Beside him stood Merry and Pippin, and they were silent.
LOTR, Book VI, Chapter 9
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
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