[Kalimac]

Good point, Lostgaerial, but to be honest I'd have expected the opposite. Since Sam knows the ropes better than Frodo in this case (sorry, that one was just waiting to be made [img]smilies/biggrin.gif[/img] ) he would understand better than Frodo when something wasn't as it should be. And remember that part of their little conversation is about the rope, and part is about the knot - Frodo says something along the lines of "To think I trusted my weight to your knot!" whereat Sam gets offended and insists that he knows ropes and knots and couldn't possibly have tied a bad knot.

To be honest, this makes sense to me. Frodo (like me) knows pretty much nothing about knots, to him one knot is pretty much like another. If one of them unravels, he concludes, naturally enough given his experience, that the knot was badly or too loosely tied (Frodo may only know how to tie one or two kinds of knots, after all, and that's all that has ever gone wrong with them, so why not in this case). Sam, though, is an expert; he tied the knot and presumably did so thoroughly and complexly enough that there's no way it could have just randomly unraveled unless a very weird and unlikely series of coincidences took place; especially since good knots are presumably double and triple-reinforced against breaking/unraveling (so if portion A breaks down, portion B will still hold firm, the way parachutes have emergency cords, just in case). So for Sam's knot to have unraveled by chance, A, B, C and maybe even E and F would have had to happen in order, and he knows that it's pretty darned unlikely, which is why he concludes that it was magic - or whatever you'd like to call it [img]smilies/wink.gif[/img].

Frodo isn't really in a position to appreciate the magical quality of the event, since he didn't know how unlikely it was in the first place.