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Old 08-30-2021, 10:19 AM   #3344
CorsiHockeyLeague
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One of the things that I think people who watch the movies but haven't read the books probably get a bit thrown off by is the degree to which Sam becomes the hero... yes, he's clearly one of the heroes, but the movies by their nature don't make Frodo out to be as heroic as he should be made out to be. They do a bit of the "here's Frodo having a hard time with carrying this ring thing, sure seems to be a burden", but I don't think they sell it hard enough. As much as Sam has to go through, Frodo has the toughest job.

As far as this goes though...
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Originally Posted by afc wimbledon View Post
Really, then how come the whole point of the books was how the fate of the world really turned not on hero's and wizards but on the simple love of an ordinary hobbit and his plain common sense
Trying to boil down LOTR to one "point" or focal character is nonsense. It defies that sort of basic structure. Even as between Frodo and Sam, you could just as easily say that the whole point of the books was that Bilbo's, and later Frodo's, feeling of pity and mercy for Gollum saved the world, because if they'd killed him, Sauron wins. There's a lot of ways to look at it, both in terms of whose story it is and what the "point" is, and they're all valid. If you want to read the whole thing as Aragorn's story, you can do that, and it works just fine.

This is why I think the "Two Towers" thing was a happy accident - there is no consensus (outside of the movie where they forced a meaning on it for no reason) about what Two Towers the title refers to. There are a half dozen different ways to look at it, and they all make sense and there's no clear right answer. There doesn't have to be. It's a nice little parallel.

EDIT: incidentally, you're wrong. The ring has no power over Bombadil, but it does over Sam. Hence he ends up catching a boat later on and following Frodo west.
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Last edited by CorsiHockeyLeague; 08-30-2021 at 10:21 AM.
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