Tolkienists.org

The perceived heroism of Samwise Gamgee in J.R.R. Tolkien’s mythology The Lord of the Rings (1955) has cultivated several strong opinions about the overall purpose of Sam’s character in relation to Frodo and the events of the narrative. While there is thorough agreement within Tolkien scholarship that the narrative contains several heroes, and, as Romuald Ian Lakowski claims, ​‘there is no single ​“hero” in the story, not even Frodo’ (p. 4), the types of heroes, nevertheless, are often debated. When it comes to Sam specifically, however, the idea of him being a hero at all was at first not entirely acknowledged or accepted.…