There is a question that the majority of the Tolkien fandom has not addressed with complete rigor, possibly because the answer seems obvious: who is the true hero of ‘The Lord of the Rings‘? It seems obvious. Frodo or Aragorn, right? One bears the Ring, another leads the armies. But Tolkien himself asked that question in life and in writing, and the answer is neither.
By letter. In a letter dated April 16, 1956, and addressed to a reader named H. Cotton Minchin, Tolkien described Samwise Gamgee as more than just Frodo’s faithful companion. He described him as the reflection of the common English soldier (the privates and the batmenpersonal assistants to the officers, whom he met during the First World War, and whom he said he considered “far superior to myself”). The letter, whose existence was documented in detail by researcher John Garthis not the only one in which Tolkien talks about Sam.
To the barricades. According to further investigations who have related the impact of the First World War to Middle-earth, the relationship between Frodo and Sam reproduces with remarkable fidelity the dynamic between an officer and his personal assistant in the British army of the time. You make the decisions; the other carries the equipment, cooks, stands guard and, if necessary, rescues. The name “Gamgee”, in fact, comes from a real Edwardian doctor, Sampson Gamgee, inventor of a surgical material used during the war. Tolkien always admitted that the men who impressed him most in war were not the officers, but the common soldiers.
This is how he describes it:
My “Samwise” is, in fact (as you point out), largely a reflection of the English soldier, grafted on the village boys of yesteryear, in the memory of the private soldiers and my assistants that I met in the war of 1914, and whom I considered far superior to myself.
More missives. In the so-called Letter 131, addressed to the editor Milton Waldman and first published in ‘The Letters of JRR Tolkien’ in 1981, Tolkien goes further. There he calls Sam the “main hero” of the work. And he adds that the “rustic and simple” love between Sam and Rosie is not a decorative detail, but a structural element of the story: the tension between ordinary life and the great epic. An expanded edition of the letters published in 2023 reflects on the ideas about the moral architecture of its history, and clearly distinguished between those who carry the weight of the adventure and those who sustain it.
Around with the Ring. The One Ring operates on ambitionoffers power to whoever wants it. Boromir falls. Saruman falls. Galadriel, one of the most powerful beings in Middle-earth, declines to touch him because she knows what it would do to him. Frodo fails to destroy it. Sam, on the other hand, wears the Ring for a brief period in the Towers of Cirith Ungol and returns it without hesitation, because what Sam really wants is not power, it is to return home.
The hero. And his traditionally heroic moment comes with Shelob, the giant spider, the clearest turning point in Sam’s arc. When Frodo falls apparently dead, Sam takes Sting and Galadriel’s Flail and confronts a creature from which the Elves recoiled. He wins because there is no other option for him. And later, when Frodo can no longer walk, Sam literally carries him. At the end of the story, Sam returns to the Shire, marries Rosie, has children, and becomes mayor for seven consecutive terms. He gets the life he always wanted: heroism without ambition receives the fullest reward.
This is how Tolkien himself defines it:
I think the simple ‘rustic’ love of Sam and his Rosie (nowhere elaborated) is absolutely essential to the study of his (the main hero’s) character, and to the theme of the relationship between ordinary life (breathing, eating, working, procreating) and quests, sacrifice, causes and ‘longing for the Elves’, and pure beauty.
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