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Sam Gamgee - Blog Posts
I decided to redraw the hobbits hiding from the Nazgûl! I was inspired by the Nazgûl in the animated lotr film but my version just ended up looking like a Scooby Doo villain (I kinda like him tho)
“He never had any real hope in the affair from the beginning; but being a cheerful hobbit he had not needed hope, as long as despair could be postponed.”
The comic is based on a scene from the chapter “The passage of the marshes”
Me: *strapped to a chair in a cold interrogation room with a middle aged man pacing back and forth*
Him: *projects a picture of Sam and Frodo on to the wall* What is their relationship?
Me: Their ship is valid and very cute, but we should also consider the idea that their admiration and respect for one another is a deep, platonic bond. Love doesn't always have to be romantic, and it is important for men to be able to express their platonic care for one another in a way that toxic masculinity doesn't currently allow.
Him: Okay *projects a picture of Legolas and Gimli* what's their relatio-
Me: They're fucking.
LAY CLOSE TO ME??? MY aRM arOUnd yOu??? yOUr sAM??
pEaCe wAS oN bOTH thEIr faCEs !!¡!!!¡!!@
„as if it came out of memories of the Shire, some sunlit early morning,“
Another scene from The Two Towers!! 🍃
Watch me illustrate the entire LOTR series by accident 😭
How could the world go back to the way it was when so much bad had happened? But in the end, it’s only a passing thing, this shadow. Even darkness must pass. A new day will come. And when the sun shines, it will shine out the clearer. —The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (2002)
Please tell me i’m not insane
I was listening to The Milk Carton by Madilyn Mei, and I fully realized, this is Sameise Gamgee’s song.
From the entire message of leaving home and being terrified yet enthralled, to the messages about seeing things only heard of in stories and realizing the true intensity of them, and trying your best to stay there for the one you support, and that knowledge that even if you do return home somehow, it will never be the same. Even the lines of “You can still win, just gotta be faster” falls into the reassurance for Frodo. Hell, even the “Something tells me kid never learned to swim, can I do anything when i’m also drowning?” fits Sam’s entire internal conflict SO FUCKING WELL??? I have no idea if this was intentional or if i’m reading WAYYYY too far into this, but please tell me what you all think!!
(Following are the main lyrics that stood out to me as Sam’s song!!)
Being an adult means first reading Sam's "Well, I'm back." quote at the end of LOTR as a ten year old and thinking it's a weird stupid ending, and then reading it again as a 24 year old and crying because it's the most beautiful perfect ending ever written in the history of literature.
the fellowship of the ring as bizarre t shirts
tag yourself I'm delululemon
who i would let borrow my car in lord of the rings:
boromir- would likely take it to a car wash and fill up the tank for me afterwards. no questions asked and the keys are in his hand before he finishes his sentence.
gimli- would change my tires for me. a bit worried about him off roading but he’d take care of it. it’s extremely likely that he also took it through the car wash but not out of politeness but because he got it caked with dirt and mud while driving.
elrond- i’m willing to bet my life on this man being a reliable driver. he could get negative traffic tickets- as in, the cops pull him over just to tell him how good of a three point turn that was. this man is married to the turn signals.
sam- there might be dirt and dog hair left over for weeks but yeah i’d trust him. he probably just needs the trunk space for a dresser he found on the side of the road.
who in lord of the rings i do not trust with my car:
gollum- yeah obviously he’d drive it into the swamp in .2 seconds. this little fucker does not follow road laws or any laws. the second gollum takes my car i know its over.
gandalf- i do not know how one sends an automotive on a quest but im pretty sure my car is in moria rn and i’m never seeing it again
legolas- has the biggest passenger princess energy i’ve ever seen. would total my car immediately after going diagonal across the highway because he saw a cool tree
thranduil- like father like son. passenger princess who has not been behind the wheel for decades. would guilt trip me into giving him a ride before even asking to borrow my car. gets pulled over for having a whole ass wine bottle in the cupholder.
pippin- there would be peanut butter stuck in the console for months and i’d be finding loose snacks and trinkets in my seats years afterwards. also strikes me as the type to be obsessed with the radio to the point of reckless driving
Best uncle 🌟🌟
(the age here are probably not canon but hey, i'm free 🫡)
I've watched for the first time lord of the rings some weeks ago and i loved it !!! Now i'm waiting a little bit before watching the hobbit hehe
Concerning Hobbits (of Color)
Okay it’s been a whole day and I’m still angry about that hobbit casting thing, so let’s lay down some Tolkien canon here.
Fact 1: Per Tolkien, there were originally three races of hobbit. The Stoors were a small group, they were broad and stocky, they grew facial hair, they liked rivers, and their skin color is not specified, so Tolkien probably meant them to be white (but there’s no reason they have to be, since again, not specified). The Fallohides were a tiny group, they were thin, pale and tall, they were bold and good with languages, and they like trees. The Harfoots were the distinct majority, they lived in holes, they had hairy feet, and they were brown. Tolkien is super clear on this. He explicitly calls out Harfoots as having browner skin than other hobbits when describing the races and he uses phrases like “nut-brown skin” and “long brown fingers” when describing specific hobbits to back it up.
Fact 2: Britain planted its ravenous imperial flag firmly in the soil of India three centuries before Tolkien wrote The Hobbit. He knew what a brown person looked like. He would know he was not evoking a slightly darker shade of Caucasian when he said a person had brown skin.
Fact 3: Bilbo, Frodo, and all of their friends are aristocracy. Sam is the only hobbit we ever meet who is an actual laborer. In Tolkien’s time, laborers worked in the sun and middle class and aristocracy stayed inside where there was something resembling temperature control. Apart from Sam and Aragorn, no one in the Fellowship (or Company) ever voluntarily got a sunburn. If Tolkien talks about brown skin he’s talking about brown skin, not a farmer’s tan.
Where does this leave us?
Well, Tolkien says that after colonizing the Shire, the three hobbit races mingled more closely and became one. This leaves us with two options.
Option A: He’s talking about that thing that sci-fi writers sometimes do where “everyone is mixed race.” So all three races would have smeared together into a single uniform color. What color? Mostly Harfoot, aka brown. The “strong strain of Fallohide” in the Tookish and Brandybuck lines means maybe they’re white-passing, but in this scenario all hobbits are brown.
Option B: He’s talking about a more melting-pot scenario where visual racial distinctions still exist but everyone lives side-by-side in a fairly uniform culure. The Tooks/Brandybucks having a “strong strain of Fallohide” means that they are themselves remaining strains of Fallohide, and are straight-up white. Merry, half Took and half Brandybuck, is thus white (possibly part Stoor, given Brandybuck comfort with water); Pippin, half Took and half Banks, is either white or biracial. The Baggins family, sensible owners of the oldest and most venerable hobbit-hole anyone knows of, are blatantly Harfoot, making Bilbo and Frodo (half Took and half Brandybuck respectively) also biracial. Fallohides being exclusively adventurous high-class types, and the Gamgees being staid low-class homebodies with a distrust of moving water, Sam is obviously Harfoot and thus completely brown. (Smeagol, a Stoor, is probably white, but as discussed above, doesn’t have to be.) In this scenario, a minimum of three of five heroic hobbits are various shades of brown, four out of five of them could be, and most background hobbits are brown.
In conclusion, if you think all hobbits are white, you are canonically wrong. If you geek out over Aragorn wearing the Ring of Barahir, rage about Faramir trying to take the Ring, and do not even notice, much less complain, that Sam, Bilbo and Frodo are being erroneously portrayed by white guys, you need to reexamine the focus of your nerdery.
I offer you this Sammy portrait
Sauron is watching ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
Thinking about this quote in light of Christmas:
"And why, sir, I never thought of that before! We've got—you've got some of the light of it in that star-glass that the Lady gave you! Why, to think of it, we're in the same tale still! It's going on. Don't the great tales never end?"
There's no glass filled with the light of the Christmas star, but the light of the world that arrived at Christmas is still shining in and among us. The tale is going on, now and for always.
