The principals in LOTR all are aristocrats, except Sam, who is an ordinary hobbit. “I think the simple ‘rustic’ love of Sam and his Rosie (nowhere elaborated) is absolutely essential to the study of his (the chief hero’s) character, and to the theme of the relation of ordinary life (breathing, eating, working, begetting) and quests, sacrifice, causes, and the ‘longing for Elves,’ and sheer beauty” (Letters, p. About the source of that act, Tolkien writes: In terms of the action of the book, it is Sam who drags Frodo, the Ring-bearer, across the finish line and saves Middle-earth from Lord Sauron’s evil. In an important 1951 letter, where Tolkien lays out the key themes of his work for the editor at Collins publishing house, Tolkien explains that his chief hero is Sam, Frodo’s gardener. Hobbits are plantsmen with a sensibility attuned to the value tones of plants’ color, texture, movement, space, structure, and scent. 242).Įlves have a particular sympathy with trees and it is with wood that their craft excels. Morals have a similar value standing: if I tell you a story about how I met a benefactor or about a civil chat I had with a man on a train whose conversation suddenly flashed with malice, you all have clear to mind a range of value tones that make these encounters comprehensible ( Letters, p. We can replicate this value tone in lip balm, fizzy pop, and even gin, once we have distilled it into a chemical formula. An example of a value tone: If I say “peach” you all now have the taste, smell, and feel of a peach clear to your mind. Lord Shaftesbury says, “there is a power in numbers, harmony, proportion and beauty of every kind, which naturally captivates the heart and raises the imagination to an opinion or conceit of something majestic and divine.” Like every design object, a garden is a conceit, a story composed of myriad values tones. In his 1759 The Theory of Moral Sentiments he imagines a callow gentleman witlessly deferring to complexity and therewith paying servants to beautify his house and gardens. Adam Smith develops the idea in his famous invisible hand. These transcendentals shape and order values, which make an appeal and evoke deference in us. He argues that gardens refine civilization by engaging with number, order, and complexity. In his consequential 1711 Characteristics – a text Carl Schmitt believes basic to Romanticism – Shaftesbury offers gardens as an example symmetry and beauty. Tolkien makes use of a British tradition dating to Lord Shaftesbury. He is a figure not of glory but solidarity, or, to use Tolkien’s preferred term, fellowship. Sam is a true knight for he combines toughness with tenderness. The gardener armed with hoe and shears is a tough-minded protector, controlling but ultimately obeying the logic of plants, humbly attuning craft to the seeds of life. What is the difference between gardens and jewels? Unlike the Silmarils, gardens must be tended. Tales of remarkable heroism fill the pages of The Silmarillion but the bravery of the Elves cannot repair the ever-renewing fracturing provoked by lust for the jewels. Lust for the Silmarils – jewels embalming the light of the trees of Valinor – destroys solidarity amongst the Elves. He is a type of hero, a type that corrects the heroics of the Elves in Tolkien’s magnum opus, The Silmarillion. It is for this reason that Samwise Gamgee, the gardener, is LOTR’s “chief hero,” as Tolkien puts it. This deeply personal paragraph is also a value thesis: the claim, I suggest, that gardens make us noble. I am (obviously) much in love with plants and above all trees, and always have been and I find human maltreatment of them as hard to bear as some find ill-treatment of animals” (Letters, p. The ennoblement of the ignoble I find specially moving. The inter-relations between the ‘noble’’and the ‘simple’ (or common, vulgar) for instance. “There are of certain things and themes that move me specially. 288-89).Ī paragraph from a 1955 letter takes us to the heart of Tolkien’s moral and political thinking in LOTR: I like gardens, trees, and unmechanized farmlands I smoke a pipe, and like good plain food (unrefrigerated), but detest French cooking I like, and even dare to wear in these dull days, ornamental waistcoats” (The Letters of J. “I am in fact a Hobbit (in all but size). In his Letters, Tolkien often mentions working in his garden.
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