If you were Sam on Sauron's Road...

[Kalimac]

Thanks everyone for posting! (Yay! I'm a Wight! [img]smilies/smile.gif[/img])

Raefindel, good point. I don't have any children but I think I know what you're getting at - you can be a lot fiercer when you're afraid for someone else than when you're afraid just for yourself, and "to know all is to forgive all" doesn't always affect you very much. And Sam is definitely taking a very parentlike attitude towards Frodo at this point ("He won't be able to do anything for himself" and piggybacking him up Mount Doom).

And here in the comfort of my computer room I definitely feel sorry for Gollum knowing his background, whether I would have felt that way if actually sitting next to him in Middle-Earth is another question. The scariest experience I've had is being held at gunpoint by four guys; considering the part of the world we were in, I don't doubt that several of them had very sad backgrounds, a la Gollum, but if I'd been given chapter and verse of their stories at that point I still wouldn't have felt anything but the desire to get as far away from them as possible. If they'd surrendered, though, no, nothing violent. But definitely tying them up or something just to keep myself from being harmed. Fortunately Sam was wiser ...