It’s a worthy argument but I’m on the fence about it. This is the dawning of the age of men, right? So the elves are fading out. As Tolkien wrote the characters, yes, it seems that it Must Be, but he could have made Eowyn less pitiable and tragically young.
I wouldn’t say I like Lobelia Sackville-Baggins, per se, but I sure as heck respect her.
(and I think she does actually show up, very briefly, at the end of The Hobbit)
I have, though, heard the suggestion that some of Thorin’s company were female, but Bilbo (and hence we) just couldn’t tell.
Perhaps I didn’t express myself well. What I meant was that Tolkien thought it would be best for the dynasty to get some more Elf into it, and that he also thought it would be best if it was True Love, so he wrote it that way. The two would, of course, go together in Tolkien’s world.
Actually, Rosie Cotton was one bit of poor writing. She suddenly shows up in the last part of the book and I go “whoa! Sam has a girlfriend? Where’d she come from?”. I’m fairly certain there’s absolutely no hint of her earlier in the book. She should have had a part in Fellowship, even if not a big part.
I thought she appeared earlier but I might be conflating the movie with the novel.
She is not mentioned until Sam thinks of her while on Mount Doom. I just checked.
I missed that. So she didn’t come totally out of no where. But it still would have been better for her to have a bit part in Fellowship.
The movie introduced her at the start, and it worked, but I don’t think it would have worked in the book. It’s the show vs. tell distinction. The movie needed some scenes to show “it’s a party”, and it’s naturally going to look at that party from multiple points of view, so it costs nothing extra to have one of those scenes be a pretty lass on the dance floor gesturing for a lad to join her. There, you’ve established the party atmosphere, and also introduced a main character’s love interest, without having to spend more than a couple of seconds of screen time on it. But that fluidity of point of view doesn’t work nearly as well on the page as on the screen, and there’s no reason why Frodo or Bilbo would be focused on who the gardener is or isn’t dancing with. The equivalent line in the book would be something like “There was music and dancing”, and it would be jarring to go into any more specifics about the participants.
No, it would have been easy to insert Rosie and Sam as an item at the party. Though the narration is omniscient, Frodo is also watching, and could observe them dancing, probably wryly. It would be a line or two, no more.
Bilbo’s ‘cousins, the Sackville-Bagginses’ show up at the end, but there’s no first names used; Lobelia doesn’t get specifically named until the later books.
The easiest way to introduce Rosie might have been when gandalf found Sam lurking outside the window, and Sam said, “please don’t turn me into anything unnatural, my old grandfather would have a fit”, to say, instead, “my girl Rosie would have a fit”.
Of course, it’s awkward for a man with a girlfriend to disappear for an extended journey. I don’t think Tolkien knew Sam had a girlfriend at that point in the story.
Tolkien discusses quite often that a good deal of LotR was made up while he was going. I think after Gandalf falls with the Balrog in Moria, he took something like a year off before coming back.
Things he made up much later:
- Faramir <–I just read he invented Faramir right when he needed him
- Rosie, as stated
I really have no idea the full list, but I’d love to know what stuff he had NO idea about when he was writing the Fellowship portion of the book. I’ve always felt like Fellowship of the Ring feels like a sequel to the Hobbit, while everything post-Moria(and especially post Fellowship) feels like its own thing entirely.
I think that, at that point of the story, they weren’t yet in a relationship, just a mutual crush that Sam was too shy to act on. But then, along the way, a few things happened to build up Sam’s self-confidence a bit, so when he got back he had no difficulty asking her out.
For that matter, a similar development happens with Merry and Pippin. That’s part of the significance of the Scouring of the Shire: By putting them back where they came from at the end, we get to see how much they’ve developed, and how, after Saving the World, ordinary Shire-scale problems have become easy for them.
EDIT: That is to say, at that point of time, as we learn from Sam’s memories later in the story. I don’t have any idea of when, in the process of writing, Tolkien came up with various ideas.
That’s one of the big complaints I have with the movie - Merry and Pippen leave the Shire as nincompoops, return to the Shire as nincompoops with fancy costumes (and probably PTSD). In the book they were never nincompoops, and came back to be heroes in the Shire for the rest of their lives.
I think there really could’ve been something between The Elf-queen Galadriel and Gollum, and the fact these potential L.I.'s were never allowed any breathing room for possible courtship and then sex is quite confounding.
Eh, I wouldn’t say they were nincompoops. They were goof-offs. But I’ve known plenty of students who were goof-offs, but who could still crack down and get serious when they needed to.
No, the two were deeply in love. That is why they married. However, for the Eowyn/Aragorn shippers some other reasons need to be given to show why that relationship wasn’t going to work.
Oh yeah they were. “Fool of a Took!" he growled. "This is a serious journey, not a hobbit walking-party. Throw yourself in next time, and then you will be no further nuisance.”
That was my impression too.
I don’t think Tolkien was that progressive. 
No, he decided that Frodo & Sam was enough.
What about Gimli and Legolas?! That’s the real couple in the story. (I was miffed at the movie for completely removing that, and partially replacing it with a Legolas/Aragorn relationship.)