When Sam took the Ring and entered Mordor, we get the famous passage that lots of people take for Sam’s test versus the Ring:
Already the Ring tempted him, gnawing at his will and reason. Wild fantasies arose in his mind; and he saw Samwise the Strong, Hero of the Age, striding with a flaming sword across the darkened land, and armies flocking to his call as he marched to the overthrow of Barad-dur. [LR 6.01.018]
I don’t agree that this is the test. This attempt to suborn the faithful Samwise is risible. If that’s the best the Ring can do, it wouldn’t have been a problem for anybody, let alone Boromir, Gandalf, or Galadriel. Tolkien gives us a hint that this idea isn’t quite right, though. The previous sentence takes us into Sam’s thoughts: “He felt that he had from now on only two choices: to forbear the Ring, though it would torment him; or to claim it, and challenge the Power that sat in its dark hold beyond the valley of shadows.” Sam is thinking, which is not his strong point. We shouldn’t expect him to comprehend such an important and subtle matter on the first try.
Tom Hillman points out that the Ring is exploiting the way Sam loves old fairy-stories.1 Sam is a romantic. In that passage, the Ring is using Sam’s romanticism against him. That’s what the Ring does, as we know. It attacks your virtues. It uses your strengths against you. But a fondness for old stories and songs is more of an endearing trait than a great virtue.2 It’s not where the Ring would try Sam, when we know that he has a great virtue to work with. That’s where we should expect the Ring to attack first.
Sam’s great virtue is his loyalty to Frodo. That’s where the Ring ought to start to work on him, and sure enough, it did. Back in “The Choices of Master Samwise” we saw the real attack.
He flung the Quest and all his decisions away, and fear and doubt with them. He knew now where his place was and had been: at his master’s side, though what he could do there was not clear. [LR 4.10.057]
Right there, Sam lost the contest of wills with Sauron’s Ring. Fortunately, being Sam, he botches the attempt to rescue Frodo, loses the orcs in the tunnel, and concusses himself on the door. The Ring fails to get back to Sauron, and Middle-earth survives for another day.
People who like to find the hand of the Valar in any lucky break will be disappointed, but Sam’s failure to make a heroic stand over Frodo’s body isn’t a eucatastrophe. It was predictable. Indeed, it was predicted back at the beginning of the story! I knew not that Pippin, of all people, was a hobbit foresighted, but he’s the one who said, “Sam is an excellent fellow, and would jump down a dragon’s throat to save you, if he did not trip over his own feet,” and he was almost exactly right. [LR 1.05.060]
It’s only fair. If Sauron can turn people’s strengths into vulnerabilities, some Vala or other ought to be able to turn klutziness into a world-saving virtue. There may be hope for me yet.
Kate Neville
Very interesting, but against that, I consider the inability of Sauron (and his boss and his minions) to comprehend or appreciate unselfishness, which is at the heart of Sam’s sort of loyalty. It’s like pity in that respect, in that it is a virtue that puts the good of the other above one’s own good (which, of course, is Christian Love). One might say that in taking the Ring from (apparently) dead Frodo, Sam was “doing for Mr. Frodo” what Frodo was no longer able to do himself. Of course, in choosing to try to rescue Frodo, Sam would have been conscious only of a desire to protect him from physical harm, but it is also true that a captured Frodo would have been a disaster for the Quest, for he would have revealed all to Sauron. Sam comes up short in chasing the orcs because he wears the Ring and is deceived by the distance between him and them. Deceived by the Ring, ironically proving the event that leads to Frodo’s providential rescue.
I do take your point about Sam’s ‘test’ being weak sauce — it always seemed to me to be a lesser version of Boromir’s ravings on Parth Galen. Perhaps it says more about Sauron’s inability to understand hobbits; it must have puzzled him greatly that Gollum never tried to take over the goblin realms in the Misty Mountains.
Well, anyway, you caught my attention! I am going to be niggling over this for some time…
Stephen Winter
Like you, Kate, I am going to be thinking about Jo’s excellent reflection for some time to come. I confess that I had thought that Sam’s fantasy in which he is the hero was my understanding of his temptation partly because a younger version of myself would have been tempted in exactly this way.
Tom Shippey gives a lot of thought to the relationship between luck and providence and Sam was definitely on the side of luck. Providence is not about the Valar though. It’s beneath their pay grade. The one who “meant” Bilbo and then Frodo to have the Ring is Ilúvatar and now he uses all Sam’s confusion from good.
Anyone who has read my earlier work on the Valar will now know that I have changed my mind about their role in the story.
Joe
Oh, yes — any boy would fall for that in a second. I hope the Ring wasn’t misled by Sam’s height.
Joe
That provokes some thought. Is it necessary for an evil force to understand a virtue before they can exploit it? I’m certain Sauron doesn’t understand Sam’s fidelity any better than he understands Boromir’s patriotism or Gandalf’s pity, but the Ring used those when (or would have if) it could.
But then, a swindler certainly understands his mark’s propensity toward charity. Just not in the way the mark does. The answer isn’t obvious.