Sam the Ghastly Arriviste

[Anguirel]

People of the Barrow-Downs. It is time to make a stand.

Of late I have heard much nauseating drivel about how Sam is so courageous and loyal and cute and so on. I would like to raise a little discussed point.

Okay, sure, during the Quest Sam might have been quite a good valet. But look at the little devil once he gets back.

The burlesque figure of comedy, the decent Comrade Sam, becomes a blimming pillar of the upwardly mobile bourgeoisie of the Shire, outclassing the Sackville-Bagginses by miles.

Seriously. Look at Frodo's chivalrous, melancholy, Quixotic, spiritually enhanced nobility. He understands what's going on and what's been lost. He realises that the honours of the Shire and petty and ludicrous and yearns for higher things.

Sam takes advantage of these feelings! The fella nabs the Mayorship, blast it all, he even gets Bag End! A Gamgee in Bag End! Thank goodness poor Lobelia didn't live to see it.

But it gets worse still. Look at his family tree. Does he bring up his thirteen children to be proud of their lowly origins and decent, peasant virtue? No! He makes himself and them ridiculous by aping the aristocracy. He marries them into the noble, but, I imagine, quite poor, what with Merry and Pippin's poker debts, clans of Took and Brandybuck. (Politically exploiting Elanor's sex appeal, by the way.) The upper classes gain money from prostrating themselves before Samwise the Nouveau-Riche!

They even renounce their surnames and become Gardners! Such typical arriviste insecurity.

And yet despite all this pursuit of material success-and, what's worse, attainment of that success-Sam gets a bleeding ticket to Valinor.

Seriously, is no one else depressed by the spectacle of Halfwit Gamgee, Banana President of the Republic of the Shire, who cannot begin to comprehend the sacrifices and transformations Frodo has gone through, who never thought of sympathising with Gollum-ever-winning the jackpot? Nineteen times Mayor, father of a massive tribe with dynastic pretensions, usurper of Baggins property, and he gets to sail to Heaven on Earth, thereby invalidating the price Frodo had to pay for his passage-the scourging of his ghastly Hobbit-Middle-Englishness...

It's like the ending of Animal Farm or The Sword of Honour. Grim.