“I said I’d carry him, if it broke my back… and I will:” An Analysis of the Development of Frodo and Sam’s Relationship in J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings Trilogy Esther Oziel College

In the Lord of the Rings trilogy, author J. R. R. Tolkien creates a relationship between Frodo and Sam that people struggle to define in modern parlance because of its depth and complexity. Neither lovers nor merely friends, the essence of Frodo and Sam’s relationship cannot be captured by contemporary words because they oversimplify the nature of the relationship. At the beginning, their relationship is reciprocal as both Frodo and Sam benefit from one another, however their reciprocity develops into codependence throughout the course of the novel. At the conclusion, Frodo and Sam’s relationship evolves into an altruistic one in which they are able to let each other go at a cost to themselves because they want to benefit the other. There is no contemporary all-encompassing definition for Sam and Frodo’s relationship because it is not one sole thing as it evolves over time and eventually reaches the pinnacle of Agape, demonstrating that their love for each other is true.

The suggestion that Frodo and Sam are actually homosexual lovers is a common conjecture about the characters’ relationship in today’s popular culture as a result of “the enormous outpouring of fan fiction” after the Peter Jackson film adaptations (Smol 949)....