Not By Taters Alone: Sam and Story (I)

Did any reader ever guess -- could any reader ever have guessed -- when first reading the early chapters of Book One that Sam Gamgee would become the final narrator of The Lord of the Rings?  It hardly seems likely.   While it's true of course that the Prologue twice refers to a 'Samwise' in connection with The Red Book (FR 13 and 14), his surname is never given; nor in the Tale itself is Sam ever called Samwise until Frodo does so over six hundred pages later in The Passage of the Marshes (TT 3.ii.624).¹ And for most readers, even if they assumed that Sam and Samwise were the same, the identity of the third person narrator was probably not a question that arose.

And yet the seeds of this transition, of the moment when the telling of the Tale is handed over to Sam, are planted in the very first dramatic scene of the book, in which Sam's old father (the Gaffer) and several other hobbits meet over a pint at The Ivy Bush on a late summer evening.  The recent announcement of Bilbo's party has sparked conversation about 'the history and character of Mr. Bilbo Baggins,' and as the long time gardener at Bag End the Gaffer 'spoke with some authority' on the stories about him (1.i.22).  Towards the end of the conversation, however, the Gaffer also singles out his son Sam, who is not present, as one who has always taken a very special interest in stories.

But not for Sam are the gossipy stories with which these hobbits have busied themselves this evening: Bilbo's rumored secret hoard of 'gold and silver, and jools;' or the strangeness of Bucklanders who live 'on the wrong side of the Brandywine River, and right agin the Old Forest....a dark bad place, if half the tales be true;' or about the mysterious demise of Frodo's parents who were 'drownded' while out boating, of all things; or the just frustrations of Bilbo's relations, the hyphenated and universally detested Sackville-Bagginses (FR 1.i.22-23).  Even the hint of the foreign and the strange that comes into these tales -- the Old Forest, Bilbo's journey to a far land and return with (reputedly inexhaustible) wealth -- is nothing more than grist for the local gossip mill, and indirect proof that 'Bag End's a queer place, and its folk are queerer.' (1.i.24)  The Gaffer and his fellows shine a lurid light on every bit of it. Indeed the one ray of approval in the whole conversation is the statement that Old Gorbadoc Brandybuck kept 'a mighty generous table' (1.i.23)  And despite the Gaffer's denial of the tales about Bilbo's wealth and his stout defense of Bilbo's character, he, too, is clearly have a grand time 'holding forth' on these matters.

No, as the Gaffer makes inimitably clear, it is tales of an entirely different kind that interest his son:

'But my lad Sam will know more about [Bilbo's wealth]. He's in and out of Bag End. Crazy about stories of the old days, he is, and he listens to all Mr. Bilbo's tales.  Mr. Bilbo has learned him his letters  -- meaning no harm, mark you, and I hope no harm will come of it.

'Elves and Dragons! I says to him. Cabbages and potatoes are better for me and you. Don't go getting mixed up in the business of your betters, or you'll land in trouble too big for you, I says to him.'

(FR 1.i.24: the italics are Tolkien's)

Not that Sam is unique in knowing his letters of course.  The hobbit-children who see Gandalf arrive can recognize the G on his fireworks (1.i.25).  The sign on Bilbo's gate and the written invitations -- to which came written replies -- also strongly suggest a widespread basic literacy (1.i.26).  To this we may add the notes Bilbo left with his gifts, two of which refer to letter writing, and one to book borrowing (1.i.37-38). (The Gaffer, by contrast, receives 'two sacks of potatoes' (1.i.38) among other strictly useful gifts.)  And finally there is Bilbo's will, carefully read right through by Otho Sackville-Baggins and found to be 'very clear and correct (according to the legal customs of hobbits, which demand among other things seven signatures of witnesses in red ink).' (1.i.39)

So it is rather literacy of a certain kind -- one that allows or encourages reading books full of 'stories of the old days' and of 'Elves and Dragons' -- that makes hobbits uneasy, so much so that the Gaffer finds it necessary to defend Mr. Bilbo's intentions in teaching Sam and to express his own hopes for the best.  Part of the answer made to the Gaffer by Sandyman, the miller, 'voicing common opinion,' touches on the same concerns that the Gaffer voices himself.  For the miller refers to visits to Bag End by folk, like dwarves and Gandalf, whom he describes as 'outlandish,' which here we should probably take quite literally (1.i.24).  Those stories Sam is crazy for all involve things beyond the Shire and far older than it.  It is no accident that 'maps made in the Shire showed mostly white space beyond its borders' (1.ii.43).

And, at least when it comes to Sam, this level of literacy is clearly linked to the dangers of getting above oneself. In the Gaffer's mouth, more so than in any other's, 'cabbages and potatoes' is a quite pointed reproach.  After all he and Sam are both gardeners. 'Cabbages and potatoes' reminds Sam not only of his station but of his very identity.  Sam is not (to borrow a much later phrase) 'Samwise the Strong, Hero of the Age' (RK 6.i.901).  'Stick to your taters, Sam, my lad,' the Gaffer might have said in a quieter mood (if he ever had one).

It is perhaps for this reason that Sam later appears to conceal how literate he actually is. We later learn that he can recite poetry about Gil-galad from memory (FR 1.xi.185-86).   Frodo is convinced that Sam has composed the troll song he performs, an assertion that Sam does not deny (1.xii.206-208). In Moria Sam expresses a desire to learn the poem Gimli recited (2.iv.315-16). And in Lórien Sam comes out with a (spontaneous?) quatrain on Gandalf's fireworks, to add to the lament Frodo has been composing; Sam immediately denigrates his own verses, but Frodo just as quickly flatters him by comparing his ability to Bilbo's (2.vii.359-60).

Most revealing, however, is the detail that emerges almost as soon as we actually meet Sam, one chapter and seventeen years later, in a scene parallel to the one with the Gaffer in chapter one.  Again we find ourselves in a pub, and with a similar cast. Yet the times have changed somewhat.  The world beyond the comfortably blank edges of Shire maps is in turmoil:

Little of this [news], of course, reached the ears of ordinary hobbits.  But even the deafest and most stay-at-home began to hear queer tales; and those whose business took them to the borders saw strange things. The conversation in The Green Dragon at Bywater, one evening in the spring of Frodo's fiftieth year, showed that even in the comfortable heart of the Shire rumours had been heard, though most hobbits still laughed at them.

Sam Gamgee was sitting in one corner near the fire, and opposite him was Ted Sandyman, the miller's son; and there were various other rustic hobbits listening to their talk.

'Queer things you do hear these days, to be sure,' said Sam.

'Ah,' said Ted, 'you do, if you listen.  But I can hear fireside-tales and children's stories at home, if I want to.'

'No doubt you can,' retorted Sam, 'and I daresay there's more truth in some of them than you reckon.  Who invented the stories anyway?  Take dragons now.'

'No thank'ee,' said Ted, 'I won't.  I heard tell of them when I was a youngster, but there's no call to believe in them now.  There's only one Dragon in Bywater, and that's Green,' he said, getting a general laugh.

'All right,' said Sam, laughing with the rest. 'But what about these Tree-men....?'

(1.ii.44)

Now that we finally meet Sam, we can quickly see that he is as different from 'most hobbits' as the last scene suggested he would be.  Though they are laughing for now (thus, 'still') at the 'queer things you do hear these days,' Sam does not find these matters funny.  While he can take Sandyman's joke at his expense and laugh along, he can also be stung (thus, 'retorted') by the miller's none too subtle hint that he has not left childish things behind him.  He is relentless in his belief that these queer tales have relevant information in them that the others should attend to.  Thus even before the laughter has died, Sam has pressed on to the next queer thing: 'But what about...?'  For which he will also be mocked and dismissed (1.ii.44-45), as for the thing after that (the Elves: 1.ii.45), and the thing after that (Frodo and Bilbo: 1.ii.45).  But his faith in the importance of tales of this kind is unshakeable.  This characterizes Sam and sets him apart.

But there is another detail that distinguishes him even more, here and throughout this Tale, and it's easily missed.  Beyond the importance of stories about dragons and Tree-men and the departing Elves, there is another question: 'Who invented the stories anyway?'  Sam is not just 'crazy about stories of the old days,' he is thinking about them in a critical way.  And his next words --  'Take dragons now' -- are also worth noting.  He doesn't say 'Take Smaug now' as you might expect him to do if he were only trying to disprove the miller's suggestion that all such tales are childish fabrications. He is thinking about dragons plural, about dragons in general, about Dragons in the context of where stories come from.

That's not to say that Sam has any answer, or was about to blurt out some homespun version of On Fairy-stories if the miller had not deflected the conversation with a joke.  But he is on a path that is important in a Tale in which the background and continuity of other older Tales are very significant.  He thinks about stories in a larger sense because his profound desire for dragons is about more than the dragons themselves.  It is about Story itself.  So it is no accident and no surprise that Frodo entrusts Sam with finishing the Tale (RK 6.ix.1027), or that this scene ends with Sam returning home in the evening, his head full of Story, and that this book ends with Sam returning home in the evening, to take up his life and take up the work Frodo has left him (RK 6.ix.1031).

So I am going to be following this idea of 'Sam and Story' from the beginning of The Lord of the Rings to the end.  I have no idea how many posts it is going to be, how long it will take me, or whether the posts will in fact appear in order from beginning to end (though that is the plan).  The  posts I've linked to here are in a sense part of this study, but I imagine that by the time I have worked my way through the Tale all the way to the end I'll have more to say than I have said there already. I guess we'll see.

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¹ Again it is true that Sam is called Samwise in the synopsis at the beginning of The Two Towers that appears in three volume editions. It is also true that he is referred to as Master Samwise in the Table of Contents: The Choices of Master Samwise. Even so, that would nevertheless place the first clear identification of the Samwise of the Prologue with the Sam Gamgee of the Tale at the beginning of The Two Towers. Nor does everyone read the Prologue, or pay close attention to it if they do. There was a long time when I did not.

29 July 1954 -- 29 July 2014

The other morning I stopped at the deli counter of my local market.  As I was placing my order with one person, another suddenly began speaking to me rather passionately, telling me how much she loved the shirt I was wearing.  Since most of me is often submerged in my own thoughts, it took a moment to realize that the ardent voice I heard was addressing me and not someone else.  I am also not accustomed to anyone getting this enthusiastic about my clothing.

As it was, this young woman was admiring my t-shirt -- black with (for a t-shirt) a rather subtle rendering in a chalky red and gray of Smaug and the Lonely Mountain from The Hobbit -- and saying that the trailer for the third part of Peter Jackson's adaptation looked pretty cool.  I agreed about the trailer and thanked her for the compliment.  She was very kind and warm and spontaneous; and chance meetings (as we call them in Middle-earth) with strangers who share your interests are always welcome.

But from a certain perspective this meeting of ours was not entirely by chance.  It had been arranged for us before ever we were born, on 29 July 1954, the day The Fellowship of the Ring was first published.  At that time no one foresaw the eventual success of The Lord of the Rings.  Quite the contrary in fact.  The publisher thought he might be about to lose a lot of money, but considered the book a work of genius, which merited publication regardless of the risk.  And to be sure, if The Lord of the Rings had been the failure the publisher feared, there would have been no published Silmarillion, no Unfinished Tales, no History of Middle-earth, no movies, no trailers, no t-shirts, and no chance meeting with which to pass a friendly moment.

Of course the publication merely set the stage.  For everyone who responds passionately to a work must find something in it that corresponds to something in themselves.  What the work offers, and what the reader needs, must answer each other.  This most often happens in the short term.  A book, a movie, a tv show becomes popular for a time.  Interest burns white hot.  Then it's gone.  

Other works possess a more enduring interest.  For most of my life The Lord of the Rings has been popular, though never so much as in the years since the first of Peter Jackson's movies appeared.  For me the work has held my interest since I first encountered it at the age of eleven. <!-- copyright thomas patrick hillman 2014 --> Then it was the adventure, the heroism, the mythic vision of a whole world that Tolkien had so clearly in view even if the legendary past of Middle-earth was  -- for us in the days before The Silmarillion was published -- no more than echoes in song and mountain peaks rising from beyond a veiled horizon.  As I've grown older, I've learned to see far more than that in terms of style, and characterization, and description, and themes, and the way he weaves them all together to advance the whole Tale.  Always, though, the tone of 'elegiac retrospect' that permeates almost all of Tolkien's work has found in me a sympathetic reader.

So, since I enjoy reading and discussing Tolkien so much, I've decided to try something out. I will soon begin posting on this page some of my observations about The Lord of the Rings.  But to help organize them and make them easier to find as their numbers grow I've created one page for each of the six books of The Lord of the Rings, where I'll have links and very brief summary of each post.  Since I've been looking at the later books rather a lot lately, posts about these will be the first to appear.  In time, however, I will be posting notes on every part of the Tale.

And perhaps these will lead to more chance meetings.

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'Elegiac retrospect' is a wonderful term Tolkien coined (as far as I can tell) in his commentary on Beowulf to describe, in Edith Wharton's phrase, 'the poignancy of vanished things.'

The Mythgard Institute

In the winter of 2012 I was poking around the internet, looking as we all do for god knows what  -- our futures perhaps -- when I came across this guy named Corey Olsen who was calling himself "The Tolkien Professor."  Now I'll admit that my first reaction (okay, it's my default reaction) was skepticism.  "The Tolkien Professor" just sounded a bit geeky, and I'm old enough to remember when geek was not a compliment.  And what was with that definite article, huh?  The Tolkien Professor?  Was that like The O'Neill, The O'Donnell, The Humongous?

But since an essential part of real skepticism is to investigate those things at which we first look askance, and since I have always loved Tolkien, I decided to check it out.  First I listened to the podcasts of his undergraduate classes at Washington College, then to his Tolkien chats and Q&A sessions, and the Silmarillion Seminar (of blessed memory).  As someone who has read The Lord of the Rings so many times that, if I told you how many, you would roll your eyes and assume I was wearing a costume as I wrote this,* I can reasonably lay claim to being a competent judge.

And let me tell you this: Corey Olsen knows his stuff.

Now don't misunderstand me.  The discussions on the podcasts are only very seldom about whether Balrogs have wings (since of course they don't).  Rather, they are serious literary discussions that explore the ceaselessly amazing world of Middle Earth through careful study of the texts themselves.  At the same time they are also lighthearted, full of humor, and untrammeled by ponderous literary theories.  Instead they pay attention to what the author actually wrote.  Inconceivable.

While Professor Olsen's undergraduate lectures are still available through iTunes and his website (www.tolkienprofessor.com), ever since 2012 he has been embarked on a new adventure, creating and building up The Mythgard Institute, which offers graduate courses online for Master's credit and for auditing. (Tuition for both is quite reasonable.)  While many of the early courses have focused on Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, and Fantasy and Science Fiction, the range of courses and the number of professors have been steadily expanding.  Most recently, for example, Professor Olsen, a Medievalist and Chaucerian by trade, has offered two semesters on Chaucer.  I have audited both of these classes, and rarely have I had so much fun and learned so much at the same time.  I'm thinking of making a pitch for more Middle English next spring or summer.  How about Gawain and the Green Knight and Pearl?

But wait there's more.  In addition to the Mythgard Institute there's also The Mythgard Academy, which since the summer of 2013 has offered free courses on works and authors proposed and voted on by those of us who have made voluntary contributions (think NPR).  But to listen and participate is absolutely free, and if you miss a session the recordings are usually posted within a day or two.  Nor are the readings limited to Tolkien.  We recently had a course on Ender's Game, which raised my opinion of Orson Scott Card as a writer, and in the end of July or beginning of August we'll be starting Frank Herbert's Dune.  I'm very much looking forward to that.

Clearly I am quite pleased to have made this discovery.  I have learned a lot about Tolkien and tons about Chaucer.  I can't find enough good things to say about the job Corey Olsen does.  I just wanted to take the opportunity to say that.

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*Don't own one. Never worn one.  Not that there's anything wrong with that.  It's all in good fun.  And the only convention I've ever been to was the first Star Trek convention in New York when I was eleven.  Even then no pointed ears.