Well, actually Sam did want to go with Frodo. Sam wanted to see the elves – he was just kind of scared when Gandalf caught him eavesdropping.
But yes, the relationship was a mix of servant / friendship.
OoooOOHhhOHH! Yeah sort of, but after they got to Rivendell, Sam wanted to go home, but because Frodo agreed to take the ring, Sam went too. I know I didn’t say that earlier and this is a different topic sort of because it is later in the book and you other people are talking about the beginning, but…wait, the original topic was sexuality, wasn’t it? Oh yeah! I guess my train of thought derailed, so I’ll quiet down now
Don’t get me wrong, I love the hobbit hole action, but it’s more fantasies about Orlando Bloom (sans Elf makeup) than Legolas the Elf. He was never that pretty in my imagination when I was reading the books.
There’s actually slash pics out there with the actors faces over some quite lovely homoerotic imagery. I swear, what people do with Photoshop all day…
Unless your name was James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, Henry Miller, Anaïs Nin, Jean Genet …
Ian McKellen sees a homoerotic subtext between Frodo and Sam?
This is hardly surprising, given that he is a ravi snip
And yes, in the late 1930s to early 1950s when JRRT was writing this stuff, most writers were a lot less explicit, and LotR did grow out of a story Tolkien made up for his children.
I imagine, when you’re shlepping your way across the Land of Shadow, with the most hideously cursed magic artifact ever devised like a millstone round your neck, with a 500-year-old homicidal monomaniac somewhere out there in the gloom, with no food bar a crust and hardly a mouthful of water left in your bottle, feeling the after-effects of a Shelob special and a large dose of orc whip, and so on, the last thing on your mind is doing a spot of uphill gardening with your manservant.
I always picture Frodo and Sam as more of a David and Jonathan - although many commentators seem to enjoy reading between the lines of that one, too.
Anyway, most really good adventure stories get by with a complete absence of horizontal jogging. The reader has a pencil and paper.
Slight hijack, but how old would 50 be for a hobbit in human years? Bilbo was “eleventy one” when he left, and Old Took (who never possessed the magic of the ring) lived to 130, plus they didn’t even come of age until 33, so it wouldn’t be equivalent to the human “50” I shouldn’t think.
Did hobbits have a reverence for the number 11? I was wondering because of 111 and 33 being significant ages.
I’m reading the first book now for the first time. I’m halfway three and the biggest surprises so far have been the length of time twixt Bilbo’s departure and Frodo’s and the exclusion of Tom Bombodil. I wonder why they chose Elijah Wood for the role, when actually Astin looks more like the Frodo I picture from the book. A pity Michael J. Fox is too ill for such a project or he’d have not been bad for the role himself.
Walloon: But remember that when Tolkien wrote one could not legally purchase Joyce, Lawrence, Miller et. al. in England (or the US). They were classified as obscene.
We’re never explicitly told how hobbit ages compare to human ones, but if the 33/21 coming-of-age ratio holds, then a 50-year-old hobbit is in the equivalent of a human’s early 30s and a 111-year-old hobbit is about 70. That’s probably not right, as the suggestion at the beginning of FoTR is that 111 is a ripe old age, and that the oldest hobbit in recent history (the Old Took) only reached 130, which by this ratio is only about 83. If we adjust things upwards a little bit and use a 33/25 ratio, a 50-year-old hobbit should be the equivalent of a human around 37 or 38 years old, a hobbit 111 equates to about a human 85, and 130 hobbit-years comes out to about 98. That makes sense a little more sense, IMHO.
That would put Sam in his late 20s in human terms (27 or 29 depending on whether you believe Appendix B or C), Merry about 27, and Pippin about 22 or 23. And Frodo would look no older than about 25 in human terms, despite actually being older, since he recieved the ring at his coming-of-age and hasn’t aged nociably since then. (Interestingly, this ratio matches the ages of Sam and Merry pretty close to the ages of their actors.)
Malacandra: In such a situation, some sort of warm, caring, physical human contact would be what I would most be in need of. But clearly that’s just me.
Re. Hobbit ages:
If you assume that Hobbit 33 = Human 21, that gives you a factor of about .65 for adjusting Hobbit ages. Problem is, though, that makes Bilbo and the Old Took seem a bit too young (72 and 84, respectively), so some people I know of prefer to use .75. That would make Frodo the equivalent of 37 or 38 when he had his adventures.
(My gosh, but this is geeky.)
The Tolkien Timeline: Tolkien completed writing The Hobbit in 1936 (published 1937), and completed The Lord of the Rings in 1948 (published 1954-55).
Joyce’s Ulysses was first published in Paris in 1922, with its first American edition from Modern Library in 1934, after winning a court battle over the book’s alleged obscenity the previous year. The first British edition was published in 1936.
Lady Chatterly’s Lover nonwithstanding, D. H. Lawrence’s sexually themed Women in Love had been available in the U.S for decades by the time Lord of the Rings was published.
In any case, I don’t think anyone here was talking about Tolkien writing sexually explicit passages about the characters in LOTR. If Tolkien had wanted to indicate that some characters were lovers, he did have the means to say so somewhere in the broad area between vague hints and sexual explicitness.
Er, yes, Walloon, Tolkien certainly could have used non-explicit means to indicate characters were lovers.
However, that’s not at all the technique the list “Joyce, Lawrence, Miller, Nin, Genet” brings to mind. 
Amazingly, this topic was covered in a rather lengthy thread over on the Pizza Parlor.
My comment there remains apropos:
Like David and Jonathan, Frodo and Sam are portrayed by Tolkien as two males who love each other and are able to demonstrate it physically without any overt sexual subtext entering into the scenario as portrayed. Whether there’s some subliminal gayness in such a relationship I will leave to the theorists – there is no overt such feeling IMHO in either story.
Hi, Omorka!
OK, time to put the old geezer hat on and shock the younger generation. 
[Tongue somewhat in cheek]
Back in the dark ages, before the pill, the Sexual Revolution, and the 1960’s in general, there was a time when everything did not revolve around sex and people were actually known to be celibate for years at a time, and it didn’t even prove lethal! I’ll pause for a moment while smelling salts are passed around to revive those who have fainted at the horror of that prospect. Back in those days, I’m told, men and women had separate spheres and separate interests with very little crossover between them, and it was considered the way things should be. One of the divisions was men went off and had adventures, while women waited patiently at home, presumably knitting. There were a few exceptions to the rule, but they were guilty of highly inappropriate behaviour and generally behaved shockingly. What would a man want with a harridan like that? Thus the division in The Lord of the Rings, where men run around, have adventures, and generally do manly things like saving the world (note that in this context “men” includes male hobbits), while women are pretty much invisible.
[/Tongue somewhat in cheek]
Seriously, during the time Tolkein was writing The Lord of the Rings, that was the way things were. Men and women had separate roles and they did not overlap. Also, according to what Mum tells me (I’m not that much of a geezer), sex simply wasn’t something people talked about in polite society. Actually, I wouldn’t mind if things swung a bit more that direction. I have platonic friends of both sexes who I love dearly but would never consider having sex with. Also, one reason I don’t need romance novels is I’m not really into hot sex scenes as a rule. To me, too much detail ruins the story.
As for those of you going on about Frodo and Samwise, all I can say is “Sheesh!!!” Next thing you know, you’ll be going on about Lord Peter’s secret affair with Bunter!
No. I know what some of you are thinking, and please don’t even consider going there!
CJ
I agree cjhoworth.
This is folly.
You mean you didn’t get what the title Lord Peter Views the Body really referred to? – Not to mention *Gaudy Night[/1]!!
sideways hijack: I’ve got it bad for Orlando Bloom (Legolas). [insert panting smiley here]
Polycarp, you’re evil!
CJ
Omorka
Point taken; but this does not necessarily entail sexual attraction. I love my three-year-old son and have no qualms about expressing this physically, but you would very rightly be utterly horrified if this spilled over into sexual activity. (Note for any sensitive plants or those otherwise hard of thinking: the previous sentence does not, and is not intended to, equate homosexuality with paedophilia or incest.) It’s apparent that there is a deep affection between Sam and Frodo, as their language and the occasional touching and stroking shows; I don’t think it’s justifiable to infer from this that the author intended any homoerotic element between them. I don’t think eros is the appropriate word for the kind of love that Sam and Frodo have for each other.
Concerning Aragorn and Arwen, I think their story works just fine as it is. She is the last descendant of an ancient Elven family, and Elrond has stated that “she will not diminish her life’s worth for any less cause” than to be the consort of the King of the reunited realms of Arnor and Gondor. When Sauron is overthrown and Strider the Ranger has become Elessar, of whose reign many songs and stories will tell, it will be time enough for them to enter proudly into a state of blessed matrimony and, no doubt, enjoy each other profoundly behind closed doors - it’s nobody’s business how or to what extent
Disappearing into the woods in Rivendell for a crafty shag behind Elrond’s back would cheapen the story and satisfy no-one except those who insist that, because they think it’s perfectly acceptable for themselves to hop into bed with anyone they like without let or hindrance, everyone else must always have thought it was okay. It ain’t necessarily so. Moreover, authors like D H Lawrence may have been writing graphically erotic stories at about the same time that Tolkien was writing LotR, but not only were the stories themselves not socially acceptable, the activities of the characters themselves weren’t either, even within the context of the story. That won’t do for such paragons as we need as the heroes of an epic like this.
I just read the series when the first movie came out, but I’d been reading ABOUT the stories for two decades. So I approached the series quite open to the various interpretations of a possible homoerotic subtext between Frodo and Sam. I thought “gee, wouldn’t JRRT have been way ahead of his time… how subtle!”
Having now read the entire series, I must say that it simply is not there. There is absolutely NO basis whatsoever in that text for supposing Tolkien meant to imply any sort of homoerotic attraction between Frodo and Sam. I honestly think people are conflating a misunderstanding of Tolkien’s words with a lot of wish fulfillment and late-20th-century sexual liberalism to create something that just isn’t there.