Samwise and his Choices

“Tolkien did not want to be ironic about heroes, and yet he could not eliminate modern reactions. His response to the difficulty is Bilbo Baggins, the hobbit, the anachronism...” (Shippey, 71)

Why is Sam a hero? Why, when we hear about Frodo and Sam, do we hear so much from Sam’s point of view (and more so as the story goes on)? Is Sam’s heroism related in any way to Frodo’s or Bilbo’s, or does it come from somewhere else?

Defining what a hero is seems to be just about as tricky as defining what a monster is. What seem to be, at first glance, obvious hero traits, often turn out not to apply to characters who are clearly heroes. Heroes don’t have to slay monsters (or even be pitted directly against monsters--I’m not sure if Sauron is a monster or not, but that’s another problem), or really be any sort of warrior at all. A hero is, like a monster, someone who is separate in some way--who is picked up by the story because they are separate. It’s also probably true that a hero should probably be “good”, but they also need to somehow be distinguished from others or distinguish themselves.

Frodo and Sam are quite different heroes. Frodo may not be like Aragorn (or Arthur), who was born destined to be a hero, but he’s closer to being a destined hero than Sam is. In this way, Frodo is a lot like Aeneas. Aeneas doesn’t start off as one of the grand heroes who his story makes and who make the story back. In Homer, he’s a great warrior, but he isn’t on the same level as Achilles, Hector, or Odysseus--he’s sort of second-tier hero. He does have divine parentage (Venus is his mother), but in Homer he doesn’t seem to have much of interest about him. In the Aeneid, though, he’s swept up in a grand quest--he is to lead the Trojans to Italy, so that they might eventually found Rome. But Aeneas has virtually no personal agency. He’s chosen by the story, but, unlike Achilles, he can’t push back and change the story. He is a leader, but he as a person matters little. He just happens to be at the right place at the right time, and so he is separate from the world he’s trying to save.

Frodo, like Aeneas, is separate from the world. He never fully feels at home in the Shire again--in a way, he loses a lot of his hobbit-ness. This happens to Bilbo, too, to a lesser degree. Bilbo begins the Lord of the Rings by planning to leave the Shire for good, and Bilbo and Frodo end the Lord of the Rings by making that decision truly irreversible. We see Frodo’s separation from the world grow more and more as he becomes more and more closely melded with the task assigned to him by the grand story he’s in.

At the Council of Elrond, there is a marked contrast between the way Frodo and Sam accept their roles in their stories. Frodo “wondered to hear his own words, as if some other will was using his small voice”. In response, Elrond says, “‘I think that this task is appointed for you, Frodo”. Both of these things indicate that Frodo has filled a necessary gap in the story; the story has taken him there, and he had little room to choose. Sam, however, is driven by his own decisions, whether or not he quite realizes it. Sam decides of his own accord to sneak into the Council and ask Elrond to come along. Elrond accepts him, but without saying that Sam, too, is filling a role in the grand story. Sam is making his own story, so, by default, he is its hero.

At first, Sam’s story is the story of his helping Frodo, but it becomes far more than that. Sam’s point of view becomes far more prominent than Frodo’s as the Lord of the Rings goes, and his choices (even when they seem small and even when are wrong) are pivotal. We see Sam grow to love Frodo in a far more mature way than he did, because Sam also gains a greater awareness of the things he himself finds beautiful or terrible or strange or valuable. Sam returns to the Shire and raises a family there--he finds his own life independent of the quest that began with his stewardship to Frodo, whereas Frodo is consumed by his quest. Sam’s quest is to create his own story via his own choices. He’s a hobbit--an anachronism like Bilbo, from a place that few people outside of it understand--yet he is part of a very un-hobbitish quest. Frodo fits into the quest directly, but Sam has chosen to be there. Sam has free will, and he becomes a hero as he learns how to use it.

There’s more to Sam than this, even, I think; figuring it out requires tracing his story more thoroughly, and trying to understand how Sam shapes it. But I think this is why he is so compelling, and why he in particular is who we get much of the larger story from. --Phoebe Salzman-Cohen
(P.S. I think there are many more interesting comparisons to be made between Sam and Bilbo in The Hobbit, but that would make this even more rambly than it already is.)