=)
I was not surprised. I actually was predicting that Sam would have to choose to push Frodo into the fire to destroy the ring. I was surprised it was Gollum.
I thought Gollum was the most interesting character, and I found the ending satisfying. I read it around age twelve.
It astonished me, because I was accustomed to more traditional heroic roles, like Tarzan, John Carter, Paul Bunyan, The Deerslayer, Robin Hood, and the like. I had never been prepared for the much more realistic portrayal of a hero who simply…failed.
But I admired it, for the very reason that it is realistic. It’s a more mature depiction of individual striving. That was probably the point that I outgrew Robin Hood.
Frodo didn’t fail in his mission.
Now let’s be clear. Obviously he failed to destroy the One Ring, but that wasn’t his mission. His mission was to get the Ring to Mount Doom, where it could be destroyed, trusting that providence would provide a mechanism for its undoing. Willing the destruction of the Ring was beyond any mortal or even Elvish power.
See, I grew up with the awesome Roger Lancelyn Green version of Robin Hood, and the ending of that was an incredible downer: he’s injured and then tricked and imprisoned and bled slowly to death by the treacherous Prioress, and the last minute rescue comes too late to save him. I remember the feeling of disbelief and betrayal that stories were allowed to end like that, and yet at the age of six it was a valuable lesson.
Sam is most certainly not “middle class”, he is working class or, more accurately, peasantry. Bilbo, Frodo, Merry, and Pippin are middle class. Sam is most carefully depicted as their social inferior, and is highly deferential to them, and Frodo in particular, throughout.
Of course, both the British middle class and the working/peasant class fought those world wars, as Tolkien was well aware.
I agree that, from a certain perspective, Sam is the true hero, but LOTR is a complex work on which one can take several valid perspectives, and has more than one “hero”.
“middle class?” Meridoc is the heir to Buckland, and Peregrine will become The Took. These hobbits are aristocracy, not “middle class.”
Frodo is, however of the upstart merchant classes.
I saw it as a failure but as a forgivable one.
Nitpick: as the heirs of, and future holders of the titles Master of Buckland and Thain of the Shire respectively, I think Merry and Pippin are pretty clearly upper class. (Bilbo and Frodo are less obviously so, but do appear to be “gentry”).
Replies on a tablet take soooo long. 
And his uncle was a burglar. 
In Lothlorien, Sam goes through his moment of greatest temptation, that of leaving Frodo to go back to protect the Shire. Sam passes the test, but not without internal struggle. In the same scene, Frodo accidently tempts Galadriel by offering her the ring, with Sam saying that if she took it, she’d soon ‘set things to rights’. She responds grimmly, “yes, that’s how it would start.”
I wonder if at some level or other, Sam took that as the grave warning it was meant to be, that if Galadriel couldn’t handle the Ring, there was no chance that anyone else could. Even if Sam could have held the Ring long enough to use it, it would have corrupted him into becoming a tyrant who had the best of intentions.
Sam had near zero inclination towards tyranny, but the Ring would have sensed this, and this could have been a reason why he found it easy enough to return it to Frodo when that became possible again.
Frodo failed, but he failed only when nearly dying while trying to do a job that really was too great for him. Frodo was the hero saint. Hero saints are awesome, but they can be a little standoffish, what with one thing and another. Sam provided blocking the whole way to the goal. More than that, Sam had an ‘just folks’ attitude that we can better identify with, and he did great work for the last play of the game (book version). Sure, Sam well deserves his own fanbase.
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George Bernard Shaw would take LOTR as a discussion of why Britain did not go socialist after WWII.
:rolleyes:
I was a young teen at the time. The kind of stories I was accustomed to read (rather classical literature as a kid and rather dark scifi as a preteen/teen) didn’t typically involve perfect heroes who always succeed perfectly (and I already loathed such), more often the contrary, so I liked it a lot. In fact the best event of the book for me (back then and still now).
I can’t tell whether I was surprised, it’s too long ago. I guess so, otherwise, I wouldn’t have been that happy to discover that Frodo failed as he should. I probably expected him to succeed smoothly and equally probably had prepared a scornful shrug.
Wouldn’t the destruction of the ring, the elimination of the corrupting influence put Gollum, had he survived, on a slow path to recovery?
I just thought it was a way to add tension at the end. I didn’t think of it in terms of Frodo failing until much later.
Maybe…but maybe not. His metabolism might have become so dependent on the Ring, recovery would not be possible.
Like kaylasdad99, I was reading so fast and was just so shocked that I kept reading.
Tolkien said exactly that in letter 246 (Google it and read the whole thing):
Absent the subtle intervention of Eru (which is probably what happened), or the overt intervention of a Vala or one of the greater Maiar, I’d say the Ring wasn’t getting destroyed. But if such had happened without Gollum’s death, I don’t think he’d have lasted long. He was more grievously wounded than Frodo.
I suppose it’s possible the Elves might have taken pity on him and let him come to the Blessed Isle along with Frodo and Bilbo; I think Frodo would have asked for it.