One does not simply walk into Mordor without a recap, so before we start our readthrough of Book IV of The Lord of the Rings, we’re reviewing previous chapters to reacquaint ourselves with a couple of characters we haven’t seen for a while (no one special; just Frodo and Sam, the guys whose mission really matters here). After a look back at the story so far, we look ahead to the themes we’ll explore in the coming season. But first, dragons rejoice! We welcome Jeremy Edmonds of the website Tolkien Collector’s Guide to the common room for a little Tolkien Collecting 101.
Here are links to some of the sites of interest to collectors mentioned in our intro segment:
Recommended Reading:
Tolkien, J. R. R. The Monsters and the Critics and Other Essays (HarperCollins, paperback)
Carl F Hostetter (Editor) The Nature of Middle-earth (Mariner Books, hardback)
Carter, John. ABC for Book Collectors (Oak Knoll Press, hardcover)
Jeremy mentioned the TolkienGuide Calendar which is an excellent resource, it features upcoming books, events and interesting auctions.
I’d recommend having a look at least once a month to see what is coming up in the Tolkien world.
You can find it at https://www.tolkienguide.com/calendar/
i think in the speculative scenario, if aragorn goes to mount doom, arven would go too. either together with him or after. that would bring great luthien/beren parallels
In discussing Fate & Free will as part of the themes of Book IV near the end of the episode, you mention how “Tolkien said he saw Sam as the true hero”; you said that will be discussed later, and I’m still catching up with the latest episodes so I don’t know if it has been done yet.
I’d like to know your thoughts on the matter; because this is an idea that I see from time to time, but I have personally always taken it as an out-of-context reading of Tolkien’s quote in the famous letter 131 (“I think the simple ‘rustic’ love of Sam and his Rosie (nowhere elaborated) is absolutely essential to the study of his (the chief hero’s) character”)!
In this part of the letter (the way I read it) Tolkien was talking about the theme of Love, and how the contrast/duality between Sam’s rustic love and Aragorn’s noble love serves to put the emphasis on simple/rustic lives: Sam is, as a Hobbit in a “Hobbito-centric” story (letter 181), more a central character/hero than Aragorn, therefore his attributes are supposed to be highlighted as ennoblement of the humble. But that was just a point made between Sam and Aragorn, at no point does Tolkien compare Sam and Frodo in that regard; so I have troubles imagining that Tolkien meant here “Sam is the true hero of the book, not Frodo”!
I would agree that Sam seems to suit the narrative concept of a classic Campbell hero more than Frodo (he learns a lot, grows up, makes the plot go forward through action and fights, gets his “happy” fairytale-like end, and the focus is on him at the end of book VI; whereas Frodo’s personal arc is more about loss than gain, he gets the bitter part of the ending, and his struggles are more internal while Sam’s are external). In some drafts, Sam gets even more heroic actions (like the fact that he faced Ungoliant instead of Shelob). We can also talk about Tolkien’s quote about Sam being a reflexion of batmen that he “recognised as so far superior to [himself]”, though I doubt he meant that Sam was superior to Frodo: while Sam was inspired by real life batmen, and therefore is awesome and superior in personality to many people, Frodo wasn’t inspired by Tolkien himself.
But Frodo, while not technically that kind of classic hero, fits every other definition of “hero” (or protagonist) imo. I don’t think Tolkien meant to say that he was less a central character, less praiseworthy/relatable/interesting than Sam or that “you thought Frodo was the main hero but turns out in the end it was Sam”.
I absolutely love both, their actions and places in the story; but that reading of the quote, as common as it is, has always felt weird to me. So I would be really interested in any scholarly input on the matter!