I am a Tolkien fan and have been one since I was probably eleven.\u00a0 The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, The Silmarillion, his lesser works, even his biography.\u00a0 And I greatly respect the world-building he did in creating Middle Earth; the history, geography, the various non-human races and the tribes of men, even the religious underpinnings of his world.\u00a0 I love his characters and their interplay with each other and the plot.<\/p>\n
But I must be honest. \u00a0I find Frodo thoroughly annoying.\u00a0 Sure, sure.\u00a0 He carried the One Ring for the better part of a year and didn\u2019t fail until at the very edge of the abyss.\u00a0 And this after being poisoned by Shelob and frog-marched by orcs across the plains of Mordor.\u00a0 Maybe that effort was heroic to an extent that we are supposed to revere it as an herculean effort for making it 99.9% of the way.\u00a0 Maybe.<\/p>\n
But that hobbit annoys the hell out of me.\u00a0 Surely, I\u2019m not the only one who has wondered, what if Frodo had been left behind and the ring had been given to Samwise Gamgee?\u00a0 Maybe the whole thing could have been done in half the time.\u00a0 Maybe on Sam\u2019s less refined but sturdier shoulders there wouldn\u2019t have been as much angst about the burden of the ring.\u00a0 And one thing\u2019s for sure.\u00a0 Gollum would have been toast.\u00a0 Sam would have put Sting through that homicidal proto-hobbit without further ado.\u00a0 And that alone would have made the story shorter and less annoying.\u00a0 Now you might say that without Gollum they wouldn\u2019t have found their way in.\u00a0 Well, in that case they hadn\u2019t provided Frodo with enough information to get in.\u00a0 So, put Aragorn and Sam together as the team.\u00a0 Or Legolas and Sam together as the team.\u00a0 Basically, anyone but Frodo.\u00a0 I\u2019ve heard that the dream team is Gandalf and an eagle but if we\u2019re afraid that Gandalf would be too tempted by the Ring then just go with Sam and an eagle.<\/p>\n
And if Sam had succeeded in destroying the ring he wouldn\u2019t have needed to go across the sea to heal.\u00a0 He would\u2019ve gone right back to work clipping hedges at Bag End.\u00a0 No fuss, no muss.\u00a0 Sure, if Frodo had been left behind, Sam wouldn\u2019t be inheriting Bag End because Frodo wouldn\u2019t have to go to the Grey Havens.\u00a0 Sam and Rosie would need to buy a starter-hole somewhere on Bagshot Row.\u00a0 But the Gaffer surely had something socked away for Sam and the Cotton clan look like they take care of their own.<\/p>\n
Now of course Tolkien had in mind that Frodo was the suffering servant of the Lord and Sam was sort of the batman or orderly for the more aristocratic Frodo.\u00a0 This sort of synchs with Tolkien\u2019s service in the First World War where an upper-class officer had a commoner for a batman.\u00a0 And all of that is fine but I just wish Frodo had displayed a lot more pluck and grit than he did.<\/p>\n
Would it have killed him to take down Shelob?\u00a0 At least go down swinging.\u00a0 Okay rant over.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I am a Tolkien fan and have been one since I was probably eleven.\u00a0 The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, The Silmarillion, his lesser<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[241,237,4,242],"tags":[988,400,4599,186],"class_list":["post-29298","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-reviews","category-reviews","category-sff","category-sff-book-reviews","tag-frodo","tag-lord-of-the-rings","tag-samwise-gamgee","tag-tolkien"],"yoast_head":"\n