And it’s believed that he was eventually allowed to go West, too, because of that. He didn’t need it as desperately as Frodo did (he was still able to live out a full and fulfilling life in the Shire), but he was entitled to it.
True, but temps never get invited out to the cool parties with the regular employees.
In fairness, while it’s not the choice I would have made or liked to see, that’s not exactly a screw-up. I think the movie deliberately compressed Middle-Earth time in many places, to conform more to expectations about genre stories and cinema narratives.
Sam may have gone voer eventually. It’s not clear.
Sam went over years before.
Oh, wait, that’s not what you meant. 
My wife has pointed out that, if your read LotR as “slash” fan-fic (primarily Sam and Frodo, but also Aragorn and Legolas), it works pretty well, with no rewriting needed at all. 
saw 2 posts saying this - what does it mean?
A face is a good guy, a heel is a bad guy. A face heel turn is when a good guy becomes a bad guy.
The term originally comes from pro wrestling, where the wrestlers have to be identified as “good guys” or “bad guys” to keep the story interesting. But sometimes, they want to have a fight between two “faces”, or two “heels”, so one of them has to turn.
Frodo wasn’t like most hobbits, and was not happy in the Shire anymore, due to his guilt and wound, as mentioned above. Bilbo, as a true adventurer adventurer, was also not really happy in the Shire. Both had born the ring, so they got the privilege of going where they would be happier. You call Valinor like heaven, but you are missing one important part of that: there is no sickness, no pain in heaven. So they would be happy.
If I recall correctly, the time line in the appendix of my copy states that Sam did indeed travel to the West. After Rose died, Sam set his affairs in order and entrusted the (red?) book to his daughter Elanor, who was the last person to see him before he rode to the Gray Havens and across the sea.
Did he go by himself? All the elves and Gandalf would have already been gone for a while by that point right?
I think it was 60 years between the events of The Hobbit and Bilbo’s party. Maybe that’s where you got it from?
On the 17 years gap. For me the movie was clear that there was the passing of some measure of time between the party and Gandalf showing back up in The Shire to whisk Frodo away. Not 17 years true, but some time.
17 years in the books! That’s a hell of a lot of research!!
AND (in the book) a special sword.
Yes, in the movie it’s just an ironic death and one or two men would’ve had the ability to do it. But in one of the incidents from the first book that didn’t make it into the movie, Merry obtained a special sword. Merry’s strike with it made the Witch-King vulnerable to Eowyn’s regular sword. Here’s the quote from the third book after the killing:
In the chapter itself (shadow of the past) “Gandalf was thinking of another morning nearly 60 years ago when Bilbo ran out of his hole without a pocket handkerchief.”
Gandalf went when Bilbo and Frodo did, and so did Galadriel and Elrond, but there were still a fair number of elves about the place. Legolas, for a start, stuck around until Aragorn died and then, legend had it, took Gimli with him (the only dwarf ever to make the trip or even to want to), and this was some time after Sam went west. Legolas was head of a sizeable elf colony by that time and it’s likely that there were still elves there after he left.
Celeborn stuck around Rivendell after Galadriel left and assisted Peregrine (or was it Meriodoc?) in compiling the tale of years. It was said that when Celeborn left, he was the last chief living witness to events in the elder days.
Although the origin of the sword and how it was crucial to give Eowyn the chance to kill the Witch King was not explicitly described in the movie, that visual image does occur. The movie shows Merry stabbing the Witch King from behind (in the leg maybe?) with his sword, the Nazgul drops to his knees, and Merry instantly clutches his arm in pain and falls over backward (without some other blow or injury causing it), and it seems like there’s smoke coming off of his hand or his sword (not quite in the frame so you can’t tell). In this video clip, Merry stabs the Witch King at 1:54
I remember noticing it when I first watched the movie and thinking it was a nice touch that they added to the movie for people who are familiar with the books, and I was actually somewhat disappointed that the Extended Edition of the DVD didn’t have a scene somewhere explaining it.
Doesn’t really fly as an explanation for me when the dwarf corpses they find are dessicated husks that have clearly been dead for a GOOD long time. (They’re practically skeletons.)
What’s more, GANDALF clearly seems to view the idea of going to Moria as a BAD IDEA (“No Gimli, I would not take the road through the mines of Moria unless I had no other choice.”) which seems at odds with the idea that there’s a good chance that it’s a thriving dwarf colony.
In the movie, Aragorn gave the swords to the Hobbits during their journey from Bree to Rivendell, right before the Nine attacked them on Weathertop. He just dumped them on the ground and said something like “Here, you’ll need these.” Nothing whatsoever special about them at that time.
Scooped! I was going to mention that the original D&D creators (Gygax and Arneson) were explicit about being heavily influenced by Vance (in addition to Tolkien, of course).
here’s what Wikipedia says about magic in the Dying Earth series: