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Don't go where I can't follow.
The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003)
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Quizzes: Lord of the Rings Quiz, Cate Blanchett Quiz
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“Don’t go where I can’t follow” is one of the most anguish inducing and crushing otp lines out there and the fact that this line originated from Samwise Gamgee, a brave gardener with tender hands, just? Aches. There’s literally no heterosexual explanation for how Sam and Frodo treated each other
“No heterosexual explanation”? Have you ever had a true friendship? Tolkien did. He was in a war. He knew exactly the kind of bonds that form with your brothers-in-arms when you go through hell and back together.
Also, Tolkien’s works were heavily influenced by early medieval literature, in which close male bonds are an extremely common theme. In fact, until the 12th century, strong platonic bonds were valued far above romantic ones (not that Tolkien dismissed romantic love, of course, quite the opposite - but he knew that it is far from the only strong bond one can have). As CS Lewis put it:
“There can be no mistake about the novelty of romantic love: our only difficulty is to imagine in all its bareness the mental world that existed before its coming — to wipe out of our minds, for a moment, nearly all that makes the food both of modern sentimentality and modern cynicism. We must conceive a world emptied of that ideal of ‘happiness’ — a happiness grounded on successful romantic love — which still supplies the motive of our popular fiction…The deepest of worldly emotions in this period is the love of man for man, the mutual love of warriors who die together fighting against odds, and the affection between vassal and lord (gardener and ‘master’?). We shall never understand this last, if we think of it in the light of our own moderated and impersonal loyalties. We must not think of officers drinking the king’s health: we must think rather of a small boy’s feeling for some hero in the sixth form. There is no harm in the analogy, for the good vassal is to the good citizen very much as a boy is to a man. He cannot rise to the great abstraction of a res fuhlica. He loves and reverences only what he can touch and see; but he loves it with an intensity which our tradition is loath to allow except to sexual love.”
Anyway, Sam was already in love with Rosie.
If you want to ship Sam and Frodo, go ahead, but you can do so without belittling friendships. Not everything needs to be sexualized and romantic feelings aren’t required for the narrative to make sense.
Oh god, thank you, thank you THANK YOU for saying this.
I have no problem with ships. (I don’t ship anything in LOTR but I ship Bofur and Bilbo from The Hobbit, even if it’s practically non-existent in the book lol) but to insist that they’re CANON and there’s no other explanation for the bonds males have in Tolkien’s work drives me up the friggin’ wall.
When you have bombs and mustard gas coming for you in the trenches and you would die for the man next to you, then of course you’re going to develop a strong bond, and Tolkien understood that only too well.
I was even reluctant to ship anything for fun at first because the platonic non-toxic male bonds in Tolkien’s work are so important. There’s so little of it in literature/mediaof any kind and to insist that any sort of strong bond between guys is only something gay men can experience is so damn toxic tbh. Straight men need to know it’s okay to show affection to another male friend.
Enjoy your ships, people. it’s absolutely fine. Tolkien has a lot of fun subtext in it you can play around with. But don’t attack people when they point out that was never the real context of the literature.