True Hero: Frodo or Samwise?

[obloquy]

Originally Posted by William Cloud Hickli

Well, conservative Catholics like Tolkien, fortified by professional Medieval studies, would I think tend to have a rather pre-Renaissance, pre-humanist view of things: a belief that life in this world, with all its suffering, is only a preparation for the next; and that random death is 'cruel' perhaps from a human perspective, but from the divine is merely a transition into another phase of existence.

I think your point receives tacit confirmation in the very ambiguous nature of the mortality of Men in Tolkien: the mystery of the fate of Men after death has always seemed to me a means of reconciling Middle-earth with our Earth, and with Tolkien's own idea of what would happen to him--where he would go--when he died.