Notes on ROTK: The Tower of Cirith Ungol
Sam 'was utterly alone' but not unguided. Guidance comes in this chapter when he does things for no clear reason: Like the bible says, the righteous shall live by his emunah - a word that combines faith and faithfulness, which are distinct in English. It is not Sam's frame of reference, but he illustrates it.
'His eyes saw phantom lights in the darkness' which are not entirely phantom after all.
'he had no hope of getting into the orc-hold by that gate [but] He no longer had any doubt about his duty; he must rescue his master or perish in the attempt.'
'He wondered what time it was. Somewhere between one day and the next, he supposed' which on one level means literally in endless night, but on another level means in a non-existent time, since it is always one day or another. 'He was in a land of darkness where the days of the world seemed forgotten, and where all who entered were forgotten too. "I wonder if they think of us at all," he said, "and what is happening to them away there."... They were not forgotten. But they were far beyond aid. . .he was utterly alone.' Many of these are the normal thoughts of prisoners; however Frodo and Sam are in a prison constructed of time as well as space.
'He felt that if once he went beyond the crown of ther pass and took one step veritably down into the land of Mordor, that step would be irrevocable.' This is true for every choice everyone makes; Sam feels the burden of choice making that step feel more irrevocable than others. 'He could never come back' is not true (although it might be a reasonable assumption if one could be detatched enough for reasonable assumptions at such a time.)
'Without any clear purpose, he drew out the Ring and put it on again.' He is beginning to be guided, but by what? He puts on the Ring again in the same place as before; is this because it is 'the very cleft where he had put on the Ring' and, in Shelob's criss-crossing web of time, also in some sense the same time? The Ring has no particular reason to get itself put on at this moment; on the other hand, it is constantly more insistent closer to Mordor. Even if the influence is evil, Sam's openness to it allows guidance from the Unnamed Actor as well.
'the Eye of Mordor, searching, trying to pierce the shadows that it had made for its own defense, but which now hindered it in its unquiet and doubt.' Having been made, the shadows are independent; Sauron can't selectively clear them. He can use darkness as a weapon, as he did in the assault on Gondor, however that may take a single one-time effort - mustering an army rather than organizing guerilla forces. Clearing it now in a particular direction might require a degree of precision tht is beyond him.
'Faint as was the hope that his guess brought him, it was enough to rouse him. . . His love for Frodo rose above all other thoughts, and forgetting his peril he cried aloud: "I'm coming, Mr. Frodo!" He ran forward to the climbing path and over it. . .Sam had crossed into Mordor.'
Unlike in The Choices of Master Samwise, here love and will ('his duty') are united; nothing else would enable him to cross that border.
'He took off the Ring, moved it may be by some deep premonition of danger, although to himself he thought only that he wished to see more clearly.' Is this Sam's later self-analysis?
'Sam was looking at Orodruin, the Mountain of Fire. Ever and anon furnaces beneath its ashen cone would grow hot... As it drew near the great furnaces, where in the deeps of time it had been shaped and forged, the Ring's power grew, and it became more fell, untameable save by some mighty will.' This is reminiscent of Aragorn 'wrench[ing] the Stone to my own will' - and of Frodo - but here it is only Sam's will that must 'tame' the Ring: 'even though it was not on him but hanging by its chain about his neck, he felt himself enlarged, as if he were robed in a huge distorted shadow of himself.' This is what Lalaith compares to Sam's vision of Frodo confronting Gollum in The Taming of Smeagol - 'a tall stern shadow, a mighty lord who hid his brightness in grey cloud'. The word 'shadow' and the sense of enlargement figure in both descriptions, but in the description of Frodo there is no distortion. Perhaps the sense of distortion can be experienced only from inside the shadow?
In my notes on that chapter, I speculate that if the Ring is indeed the source of the shadow that Sam sees surrounding Frodo, that visible manifestation is its response to Gollum. Now I am not at all sure that Gollum is capable of inducing any effect in the Ring. Thus I am not at all sure that the Ring induced the shadow in Sam's vision. It may have come from Sam's 'eyes that can see' but it was not necessarily the Ring that he saw.
The text here links Sam's 'huge distorted shadow' to 'the Ring's power' but how exactly? Perhaps the thought of a will mighty enough to tame it reminds Sam of Frodo, and thus of his vision of Frodo's 'tall stern shadow', which is to say that his experience may be entirely subjective. However the orc that he confronts later will also see him as 'a great silent shape, cloaked in a grey shadow' which means that the shadow is objectively there - with the slight problem that Sam, the only person able later to give an account of the confrontation, can only guess what the orc saw! This leaves me unsure that anyone except Sam ever saw/felt any shadow around any Ring-bearer, and even less sure what to make of that.
He feels himself 'a vast ominous threat halted upon the walls of Mordor' - an image of power opposed to that of the Ring. But how to oppose it? '[h]e had only to two choices; to forbear the Ring, though it would torment him; or the claim in and challenge the Power...Already the Ring tempted him, gnawing at his will and reason.' - as it never succeeded in tempting Frodo - with '[w]ild fantasies' of himself as 'Hero of the Age'. This is the danger of simply resisting the Ring; if one feels that one is strong enough to resist, it tries to use the thoughts connected with that feeling of strength. (This is why I think it tries every time Frodo thinks of himself as powerful, for instance over Gollum, but he successfully resists its ever attempt to use him.)
'In that hour of trial it was the love of his master that helped most to hold him firm' - thus love here determines the strength and purpose of will, and is the quality best fitted to resist the Ring - 'but also deep down in him lived still unconquered his plain hobbit-sense; he knew in the core of his heart that he was not large enough to bear such a burden' - which is to say, the other most effective resistance is a sense of weakness: 'He'd spot me and cow me... He'd spot me, pretty quick, if I put the Ring on now, in Mordor.' The delicate balance is between knowing that one is too weak to withstand the Ring/the Enemy and still having to will to keep going, a will strong enough that the Ring cannot manipulate the fear that naturally accompanies a sense of weakness. Sam's love** of Frodo strengthens his will, so that fear for himself becomes unimportant; and his sense of his own weakness against the Ring protects him from being seduced by its clumsy manipulations (even reinforced by gnawing and torment).
**The reason that the Ring cannot manipulate Sam's love of Frodo is that love, which is a relationship between two or more beings, is beyond its awareness; it is a severed part that seeks to achieve a union which obliterates the difference between beings. The recognition of an unassimilable other, and thus the possibility of relationship, are simply beyond it.
What is 'such a burden'? While the Ring is repeatedly referred to as a burden, I think that here he means the burden of exercising power over others: 'The one small garden of a free gardener was all his need and due, not a garden swollen to a realm; his own hands to use, not the hands of others to command.' But he also acknoweldges that his will is not mighty enough to tame the Ring; indeed, the idea that it might be puts him in danger. He is stronger against it when he feels small.*
Sam 'had only to two choices; to forbear the Ring, though it would torment him; or the claim in and challenge the Power...Already the Ring tempted him, gnawing at his will and reason' -which is to say, attempting to drive him mad - with '[w]ild fantasies' of himself as 'Hero of the Age'. Here madness is connected with believing what is not true, and acting on those false beliefs, doing what one would otherwise know to be wrong, and which brings disaster upon oneself. This describes Boromir and Denethor as well, and combines two senses of madness: acting against one's own standards and causing one's own death.
* After realizing that 'he was not large enough to bear such a burden. . . With a shrug of his shoulders, as if to shake off the shadows and dismiss the phantoms, he began slowly to descend. With each step he seemed to diminish.' Thus the sense of a shadow is connected with his own sense of himself in relation to the Ring; when he feels himself powerful against it, he opens himself to its power and feels enlarged but distorted - not himself; in accepting it as 'nothing but a drag and a burden' he becomes 'a very small and frightened hobbit', which he is, but he then ignores the strength of of his own will, even while acting on that will.
This is dizzifying enough to give some hint at the similar (but not identical) process that Frodo has been going through, having to strengthen his will constantly without letting the Ring use that strength against him, so that he needs the hobbit-sense to recognize his own weakness and fear; he needs both the conviction of hopelessness and the determination to keep trying.
'He'd spot me, pretty quick, if I put the Ring on now, in Mordor.' The commas in this seem to indicate many pauses between small thoughts, as if setting it out takes a certain effort - in contrast to the preceding and following sentences: 'And anyway all these notions are only a trick' and 'Well, all I can say is: things look as hopeless as a frost in spring.' Perhaps it is not difficulty in conceptualizing, but a way of emphasizing the importance of each term, that motivates the pauses.
'But just as he was about to pass under its great arch he felt a shock: as if he had run into some we like Shelob's, only invisible. He could see no obstacle, but something too strong for his will to overcome barred the way' - not his physical strength, but his will. For his second attempt to get past the Watchers, '[h]ardening his will, Sam thrust forward once again, and halted with a jerk, staggering as if from a blow... Then, greatly daring, because he could think of nothing else to do, answering a sudden thought that came to him' -from the Unnamed Actor? from the Phial itself? Regardless, Sam is still/again open to being guided - 'he slowly drew out the phial of Galadriel. . . .slowly he felt their will waver and crumble into fear.' This affirms Sam's intuition that the Watcher's will alone blocked his entrance.
'[T]he great elf-warrior has called, with his elf-sword too!' Sting really is of Elvish make, but Sam isn't. Unlike the shadowy enlargement that he felt before, Sam feels no need to reject the identity given by the orcs.
'Terror began to grip him now. . . He would have welcomed a fight. . .He forced himself to think of Frodo.' Even without any Shelob-induced time effects, sheer fear is 'almost more than he could screw himself to face' - the same fear that made some of Aragorn's soldiers unable to even enter the plain before the Black Gate.
'Someone was running in great haste down an echoing stairway overhead.' The narrator - Sam's later self-judgement? or his experience at the time? - says that 'His will was too weak and slow to restrain his hand. It dragged at the chain and clutched the Ring.' The Ring is trying to get itself put on, and Sam is unable to keep his hand out of its control - like Frodo's hand putting it back into his pocket when he meant to throw it into the Bag End fire. Sam's general openness to guidance may also make him vulnerable to the Ring's direct physical manipulation - or the two may be unrelated; I rather think they are, since the physical bonding seems much the same for each bearer, as opposed to the attempted mental manipulation, which varies in the extreme. Again, this hints at what Frodo experiences as the Ring gets stronger closer to Mount Doom and is able to bypass his will and control his body directly (through the instantly-established physical bond that keeps each bearer from aging).
The physical effect, which is constant for all bearers, may be the germ of truth behind Shippey's otherwise inaccurate addiction theory. But I don't think that the physical effect is addictive: Neither Frodo nor Sam seems to experience anything like Bilbo's passing wistfulness for the Ring after its destruction - which is again different from both its apparent effect on him at Rivendell and Gollum's constant craving. All of these are manifestations of personality rather than of physical dependency.
In Woody End, when Frodo was not yet able to keep from putting on the Ring under the Nazgul's command, he was interrupted by Gildor and the other Elves. Sam here is interrupted by an orc, which has of its own nature no power against the Ring, but which seems to break the Ring's control over Sam: 'But Sam did not put it on; for even as he clasped it to his his breast, an orc came clattering down.' I don't know how seriously to take the implication that Sam would have been unable to keep from putting on the Ring.
The description of what the orc sees, in a chapter entirely from Sam's point of view, might be reconstructed: 'It stopped short aghast. For what it saw was not a small frightened hobbit trying to hold a steady sword; it saw a great silent shape, cloaked in a grey shadow, looming against the wavering light behind; in one hand it held a sword, the very light of which was a bitter pain, the other was clutched at its breast, but held concealed some nameless menace of power and doom. For a moment the orc crouched, and then with a hideous yelp of fear it turned and fled'. Compare to the description of his advantages against Shagrat below.*
Here Sam does not feel powerful over the Ring, rather he feels overpowered by it, and 'a small frightened hobbit'. There is no sign that he feels the cloaking shadow - a sign of power; he only sees the effect of that power on the orc. The power is connected (in ways not properfly defined) with the Ring, but in a eucatastrophic reversal it becomes manifest as a threat to one of the servants of evil.
For Sam, in Mordor, the power of the Ring manifests as making him big, but there is no sign of this being true for any other bearer at any time or place. It gives each bearer power 'according to his stature' as Gandalf said of Gollum; it may be an individual trick of Sam's mind that he experiences that power AS stature.
'He's got past the Watchers, and that's tark's work' meaning that a Man, not an Elf, is more likely to get past them, at least according to Snaga. I wonder why.
Shagrat killed his old buddy Gorbag, who was trying to kill him, in a fight over an object that does not even bond with its bearer.
*Sam 'did what was probably the best thing he could have done. He sprang out to meet Shagrat with a shout. He was no longer holding the Ring, but it was there, a hidden power, a cowing menace to the slaves of Mordor; and in his hand was Sting, and its light smote the eyes of the orc like the glitter of cruel stars in the elf-countries, the dream of which was a cold fear to all his kind.' The only thing missing in this description is the shadow. Is it to be assumed here? Is there any reason it should not be? Is it implicit in the Ring being there?
'Sam ran after him, cursing'. Having commited himself to fighting Shagrat, he could not un-commit - except for 'the thought of Frodo. . ."[I]t's my job to go right up to the top first, whatever happens afterwards."' Love, will, and the job he has known he had to do since Woody End are all united to force him to find out what he may not want to know.
'He cared no longer for Shagrat or Snaga or any other orc that was ever spawned. He longer only for his master, for one sight of his face or one touch of his hand.' In the earlier draft, this was expressed in the verses of Sam's song that didn't get into the final draft. Here it is only one line, but still there: a desire for physical intimacy - not reducible to sexual or non-sexual - and Sam's last feeling before 'feeling finally defeated'.
'[A]t the vain end of his long journey and his grief, moved by what thought in his heart he could not tell' - again, Sam is being guided, and he knows tht it is through his heart - 'Sam begin to sing. His voice sounded thin and quavering...forlorn and weary. . .He murmured...fleeting glimpses of the country of his home. And then suddenly new strength rose in him' - either from himself or a gift - 'and his voice rang out, while words of his own came unbidden' - which is a bit of an oxymoron; they are his words, but coming apparently of their own volition (which may be an insight into JRR's process of writing as well) - 'to fit the simple tune.' The words are of 'western lands', 'Elven-stars', 'stars forever dwell' - an evocation of Valinor, where he and Frodo are forever connected. I don't think that this is deliberate on Sam's part, since he has only begun to intuit Frodo's eternal existence as 'one who has passed the shadows'; rather I think it is part of the same intuition. The words shape themselves to an evolving understanding, perhaps influenced by some feeling for where the new strength is coming from.
'He thought that he heard a faint voice answering him. . .and Sam, now peering over the corner' - with what surge of hope! - 'saw a flicker of light' as if in answer to the assertion of light in his song.
'"Am I still dreaming?" he muttered. "But the other dreams were horrible."' - Frodo applying reason to even the most unforeseeable of circumstances.
'Sam felt like he could sit like that in endless happiness; but it was not allowed' - by the needs of the quest, the job he had to do - 'It was not enough for him to find his master; he still had to try and save him' - thus also his love for Frodo requires action. For his own part, having his one wish, Sam could have died right there with Frodo - and death awaits - but he chooses both the quest and life (as far as he can).
'Where are we? How did I get here?' These are not the usual hobbit question on waking - 'What time is it?' Is this a sign that the time-distortion has made such questions irrelevant, or that Frodo's frame of reference has shifted irrevocably from the Shire, the 'decent place' in which times have meaning? Wondering about their immediate situation constitutes being back on duty, like Sam, as does: 'You must tell me all about it, if we get a chance. Something hit me, didn't it?'
'I fell into darkness and foul dreams' - how Frodo remembers Shelob's poison - which looks forward to his later seemind 'half in a dream' on the anniversary of the poisoning.
'then two great brutes came and questioned me, questioned me until I thought I should go mad' - and lose track of what is real and what is lies? and do what I knew to be wrong? and do what I know to be suicidal? Frodo surely assumed that the orcs, who had 'taken everything', had the Ring, and that anything which allowed them to identify it would hasten Sauron's getting it, so he must have told them nothing for fear that anything might be a clue. If he held his tongue then, thinking that the Ring was in the hands of the enemy, and he himself quite likely doomed, it was not from any hope of being able to get the Ring back, rather out of the knowledge that neither he nor the orcs controlled everything that might yet happen. It was also a matter of remaining faithful under even the most hopeless of circumstances, as he had already set and disciplined his will to do. Does 'fingering their knives. I'll never forget their claws and their eyes' mean that going mad might mean being conscious only of knives, claws and eyes - the immediate threatening circumstances - and forgetting his purpose in having come this far at all?
'You won't if you talk about them, Mr. Frodo.' This may be a general hobbit idea, but it is also Sam's response to the immediate need to get out of there: 'And if you don't want to see them again, the sooner we get going the better. Can you walk?' While not out of character for Sam, neither is it an idea that he otherwise expresses, nor is he unwilling later, when there is time, to tell Frodo what he went though. However the text doesn't record Sam's account to Frodo, so we can't know what was directly described and what he only hinted at.
Frayach points out that Frodo usually tries to spare others details of whatever terrors he might experience; 'It was horrible. I do not with to talk about it' is more his style. The fact that he tells Sam so much is unique to both his relationship with Sam and his being in an afraid-of-going mad state. This probably connects with his telling Sam about the Wheel of Fire on Mount Doom.
'You won't if you talk about them' is pretty much how all hobbits deal with the experiences of which Merry says, in The Houses of Healing, ‘But it is the way of my people to use light words at such times and say less than they mean. We fear to say too much. It robs us of the right words when a jest is out of place.’ They don’t speak much of the depths or the heights, except in the overtones and undertones of tales or songs.
I think that here - aside from the need to get Frodo up and out of there - Sam was invoking the tried and true hobbit way of keeping bad experiences from taking over one’s whole consciousness. Frodo and Sam never avoid talking about the grim or horrible things that they have to talk about, but going over those particular past events is not necessary and may be harmful.
'it looked to Sam as if he was clothed in flame: his naked skin was scarlet in the light of the lamp above.' The Phial made Sam's hand shine red in Shelob's Lair: 'he closed his hand about the precious Phial which he still bore. Red with his own living blood his hand shone for a moment'. At that point Frodo was 'already ... some twenty strides ahead, flitting on like a shadow; soon he would be lost to sight in that grey world.' Now Frodo is regained. Then the Phial was the light in darkness; now, for Sam, it's Frodo.
Another thought about Frodo seeming 'clothed in flame': The Ring will soon become the Wheel of Fire and Frodo's appearing firey (to eyes that can see) could be a sign of some connection with it. But at this point Frodo has neither posession nor necessarily even consciousness of the Ring, which has not yet manifested in connection with fire. The Secret Fire is the animating principle of all Arda; perhaps this is what Sam sees in Frodo here.
Frodo defines failure: 'the quest has failed, Sam. . .we can't escape. Only Elves can escape. Away, away out of Middle-Earth, far over the Sea. If even that is wide enough to keep the Shadow out.' Failure is either (#1) losing the Ring before there is any chance to destroy it or (#2) the enemy taking it ('they've taken everything'). Therefore: If Frodo, not the Enemy, has the Ring, the quest has not failed - even if the Ring is not destroyed. Success means keeping it away from the Enemy. This definition is quite likely situtational, since the goal is still its (impossible) destruction, but within a long-enduring situation.
'And it hasn't failed, not yet,' says Sam - usually characterized as an eternal optimist, despite the 'not yet'. Tolkien calls him 'a cheerful hobbit' who could therefore get along without hope 'as long as despair could be postponed', a subtlety lost on those who think he is therefore optimistic; it is a matter of disposition rather than habit of thinking.
'I took it, begging your pardon' - which is not just a stock phrase here but a genuine request.
'And I've kept it safe' - meaning safe from the Enemy and also not used with any evil purpose, but kept with Frodo's own intent.
'Sam felt reluctant to give up the Ring and burden his master with it again.' It has already bonded with him physically, and he wants to spare Frodo. The physical bond is its basic method of attachment, but can it use his feelings about Frodo? It uses, or tries to use, anything it can, but is this accessible to it? Sam generally is not; the image of 'Samwise the Strong, hero of the age' is a very poor fit to him, despite being based on some of his thoughts.
In Many Meeetings, it is only the sight of the Ring that seems to make a change in Bilbo: 'a shadow seemed to have fallen between them, and through it he found himself eyeing a little wrinkled creature with a hungry face and bony groping hands. He felt a desire to strike him.' This is entirely in Frodo's point of view; Bilbo 'looked quickly at Frodo's face and passed his hand across his eyes'. We never find out what he might have seen or felt except regret for Frodo's having to 'carry on the story.'
Here, it is only when Sam brings up 'walking in the Black Land in nought but your skin' that Frodo even remembers the Ring. This argues against it having any effect on him from even a very small distance. The knowledge that Sam has it, rather than the presence of sight of the Ring, makes the difference.
'"You've got it?" gasped Frodod. "You've got it here? Sam, you're a marvel!" Then quickly and strangely his tone changed. "Give it to me!" he cried, standing up, holding out a trembling hand. "Give it to me at once! You can't have it!"' This is Frodo's response to the knowledge that Sam has the Ring, not to the sight of it. Cara thinks that his ability to keep going depends so much on Sam, a separate person with whom he can be in relationship, as opposed to the Ring's constant attempt to merge with him, that he cannot tolerate any blurring between Sam and the Ring, or between Sam and the Ring-bearer.
Sam '[s]lowly ... drew out the Ring and passed the chain over his head' explaining that 'in the land of Mordor, , , You'll find the Ring very dangerous now, and very hard to bear. If it's too hard a job, I could share it with you, maybe?' Sharing does not seem like a thought accessible to the Ring at all, so I suspect it to be entirely Sam's.
If I thought the Ring could tell one bearer from the next, I might think that it would prefer Sam, or anybody at all, to Frodo who has been so successful in resisting it, but does it recognize a multiplicity of entities outside of itself and whoever it is currently trying to merge with? It got itself lost from both Isuldur and Gollum. I am not sure what that implies about its consciousness however. When it got lost from Isildur, it lay in the bottom of a river for centuries afterwards, which hardly implies seeking a new bearer. That it got off Gollum's island implies some notion of place, but not of person. Gollum may be aware of it at a distance, but that is explicable in terms of his own ingrained desire, without its recognizing, acting on, or being acted on by him. The Ring is seeking to return to its master, but does it ever recognize that the current bearer is not its master? It can feel frustration or satisfaction with no notion at all of person - rather like a bacterium, I think.
'"No, no!" cried Frodo, snatching the Ring and chain from Sam's hands. "No you won't, you thief!" He panted, staring at sam with eyes wide with fear and emnity. Then suddenly, clasping the Ring in one clenched fist' - his charcteristic gesture of controlling it from FoTR - ' he stood aghast. A mist seemed to clear from his eyes' - which recalls the shadow that fell between Frodo and Bilbo - 'and he passed a hand over his aching brow' - as Bilbo passed a hand across his eyes. These parallels are surely purposeful. In each case, someone he loves seeks or has posession of the Ring, and in each case a shadow or mist causes Frodo to see them as other than themselves: He saw first Bilbo as something like Gollum, and now Sam as an orc.
The way he saw Bilbo could have been a direct effect of the Ring, which was in Frodo's posession, but here it is posession of the Ring that ends the hallucination: 'Sam had changed before his very eyes into an orc again, leering and pawing at his treasure.' This is not the way Frodo generally thinks of the Ring; the last time was in front of his fire in Bag End, when he said 'Bilbo went to find a treasure, there and back again, but I go to lose one, and not return.' The hallucination came to Frodo after Sam drew the Ring out, indicating that the sight of it in the posession of another affected him, as it apparently affected Bilbo in Many Meetings. This probably has something to do with its property of physically bonding with any bearer, and thus must hold for Gollum as well. Perhaps the sight of it - the visible violation of the physical bond - opened him to its influence, but he was able to (paradoxically) resist it once he resumed his role as bearer, the one who keeps it from mischief.
Frodo calls Sam a thief, which is what Bilbo (in An Unexpected Party) repeatedly told Gandalf that he wasn't. Frodo must know the true story of the finding of the Ring; it is on at Gloin that Bilbo 'looked sidelong' and asked forgiveness for telling another version earlier (in The Council of Elrond.) I suspect that Sam's having the Ring here calls Bilbo to Frodo's mind.
Bilbo (in An Unexpected Party) called the Ring 'precious' and 'my own.' Of course Bilbo never knew what it was. Frodo does not claim it, but only says that Sam can't have it.
When he was really captured by orcs, Frodo kept quiet. He though the orcs had the Ring, but he didn't see it. If he had seen it, would he have 'gone mad' and tried to snatch it back as he did from Sam?
Did the Ring - or at any rate the sight of the Ring - make Frodo 'go mad' and see an orc instead of Sam? His clasping it in a clenched fist - controlling it - brought him back to his senses. It is not a gesture that he has used in recent chapters; perhaps it is a way of asserting that he alone is the Ring-bearer rather than any direct response to the Ring.
When Sam rescued him - 'There was a orc with a whip, and then it turns into Sam!' - Frodo said he would 'never forget' the orcs' claws and eyes. Perhaps remembering what he feared would drive him mad is part of what drives him mad?
Madness here means confusing what is with what isn't, not being able to trust one's senses, distrusting where one should trust (which is a defining work of the Enemy.)
I hear Frodo's voice very hoarse in this scene. I think it must be from the orc-draught on top of going thirsty so long.
'"O Sam!" cried Frodo. "What have I said? What have I done?"' I don't think these questions are rhetorical. Frodo doesn't remember, but is judging only from Sam's reaction - 'wrung with pain, as if he had been stabbed in the heart'. Whatever he did, he is sure the Ring was behind it: 'It is the horrible power of the Ring. . . You can't come between me and this doom.' Are these two statements synonymous? Possible restatements: The Ring is (#1) what I must protect you from; it has already bonded to you. (#2) the reason I/Bilbo treated you/me that way. (#3) my doom, not yours (This is the answer to 'I could share it with you, maybe?').
'I understand' - probably all of the above - 'But I can still help, can't I?" Sam says, with determination. Does he really think that the Ring's claim on Frodo might be enough to exclude him? I think this is more his way ot steering Frodo back to the task of getting out of the Tower: 'I've got to get you out of here. At once, see!' Not 'we' but 'I' and 'you'. Sam needs to make decisions for them both now, because the horrible power of the Ring - the only thing Frodo is now wearing - can destroy Frodo's judgement. Sam supplies both plan and password.
'You lent me Sting, if you remember, and the Lady's glass.' Sam leaves open the possibility that Frodo was conscious and remembers him taking Sting.
'Frodo sat for a while and shivered, dreadful fears chasing one another through his mind.' But by the time Sam returns his humor is back: 'Aren't we going to match?'
Frodo makes sure that Sam eats and drinks: 'Here, take this elven-cake, and drink the last drop in your bottle! The whole ting is quite hopeless, so it's no good worrying about tomorrow. It probably won't come.' 'Hopeless' is to be Frodo's watchword in Mordor; perhaps it helps him keep going into ever-increasing fear.
The eastern border of Shelob's realm: 'To move an inch forward was a pain and weariness to will and limb.'
'"I got through, and I'm going to get out.". . . Sam drew out the elven-glass of Galadriel again. As if to do honour to his faithful brown hobbit-hand that had done such deeds, the phial blazed forth suddenly, so that all the shadowy court was lit with a dazzling radiance like lightning; but it remained steady and did not pass. "Gilthoniel, A Elbereth!" Sam cried. For, why he did not know' - which is Sam's watchword.
'His eyes saw phantom lights in the darkness' which are not entirely phantom after all.
'he had no hope of getting into the orc-hold by that gate [but] He no longer had any doubt about his duty; he must rescue his master or perish in the attempt.'
'He wondered what time it was. Somewhere between one day and the next, he supposed' which on one level means literally in endless night, but on another level means in a non-existent time, since it is always one day or another. 'He was in a land of darkness where the days of the world seemed forgotten, and where all who entered were forgotten too. "I wonder if they think of us at all," he said, "and what is happening to them away there."... They were not forgotten. But they were far beyond aid. . .he was utterly alone.' Many of these are the normal thoughts of prisoners; however Frodo and Sam are in a prison constructed of time as well as space.
'He felt that if once he went beyond the crown of ther pass and took one step veritably down into the land of Mordor, that step would be irrevocable.' This is true for every choice everyone makes; Sam feels the burden of choice making that step feel more irrevocable than others. 'He could never come back' is not true (although it might be a reasonable assumption if one could be detatched enough for reasonable assumptions at such a time.)
'Without any clear purpose, he drew out the Ring and put it on again.' He is beginning to be guided, but by what? He puts on the Ring again in the same place as before; is this because it is 'the very cleft where he had put on the Ring' and, in Shelob's criss-crossing web of time, also in some sense the same time? The Ring has no particular reason to get itself put on at this moment; on the other hand, it is constantly more insistent closer to Mordor. Even if the influence is evil, Sam's openness to it allows guidance from the Unnamed Actor as well.
'the Eye of Mordor, searching, trying to pierce the shadows that it had made for its own defense, but which now hindered it in its unquiet and doubt.' Having been made, the shadows are independent; Sauron can't selectively clear them. He can use darkness as a weapon, as he did in the assault on Gondor, however that may take a single one-time effort - mustering an army rather than organizing guerilla forces. Clearing it now in a particular direction might require a degree of precision tht is beyond him.
'Faint as was the hope that his guess brought him, it was enough to rouse him. . . His love for Frodo rose above all other thoughts, and forgetting his peril he cried aloud: "I'm coming, Mr. Frodo!" He ran forward to the climbing path and over it. . .Sam had crossed into Mordor.'
Unlike in The Choices of Master Samwise, here love and will ('his duty') are united; nothing else would enable him to cross that border.
'He took off the Ring, moved it may be by some deep premonition of danger, although to himself he thought only that he wished to see more clearly.' Is this Sam's later self-analysis?
'Sam was looking at Orodruin, the Mountain of Fire. Ever and anon furnaces beneath its ashen cone would grow hot... As it drew near the great furnaces, where in the deeps of time it had been shaped and forged, the Ring's power grew, and it became more fell, untameable save by some mighty will.' This is reminiscent of Aragorn 'wrench[ing] the Stone to my own will' - and of Frodo - but here it is only Sam's will that must 'tame' the Ring: 'even though it was not on him but hanging by its chain about his neck, he felt himself enlarged, as if he were robed in a huge distorted shadow of himself.' This is what Lalaith compares to Sam's vision of Frodo confronting Gollum in The Taming of Smeagol - 'a tall stern shadow, a mighty lord who hid his brightness in grey cloud'. The word 'shadow' and the sense of enlargement figure in both descriptions, but in the description of Frodo there is no distortion. Perhaps the sense of distortion can be experienced only from inside the shadow?
In my notes on that chapter, I speculate that if the Ring is indeed the source of the shadow that Sam sees surrounding Frodo, that visible manifestation is its response to Gollum. Now I am not at all sure that Gollum is capable of inducing any effect in the Ring. Thus I am not at all sure that the Ring induced the shadow in Sam's vision. It may have come from Sam's 'eyes that can see' but it was not necessarily the Ring that he saw.
The text here links Sam's 'huge distorted shadow' to 'the Ring's power' but how exactly? Perhaps the thought of a will mighty enough to tame it reminds Sam of Frodo, and thus of his vision of Frodo's 'tall stern shadow', which is to say that his experience may be entirely subjective. However the orc that he confronts later will also see him as 'a great silent shape, cloaked in a grey shadow' which means that the shadow is objectively there - with the slight problem that Sam, the only person able later to give an account of the confrontation, can only guess what the orc saw! This leaves me unsure that anyone except Sam ever saw/felt any shadow around any Ring-bearer, and even less sure what to make of that.
He feels himself 'a vast ominous threat halted upon the walls of Mordor' - an image of power opposed to that of the Ring. But how to oppose it? '[h]e had only to two choices; to forbear the Ring, though it would torment him; or the claim in and challenge the Power...Already the Ring tempted him, gnawing at his will and reason.' - as it never succeeded in tempting Frodo - with '[w]ild fantasies' of himself as 'Hero of the Age'. This is the danger of simply resisting the Ring; if one feels that one is strong enough to resist, it tries to use the thoughts connected with that feeling of strength. (This is why I think it tries every time Frodo thinks of himself as powerful, for instance over Gollum, but he successfully resists its ever attempt to use him.)
'In that hour of trial it was the love of his master that helped most to hold him firm' - thus love here determines the strength and purpose of will, and is the quality best fitted to resist the Ring - 'but also deep down in him lived still unconquered his plain hobbit-sense; he knew in the core of his heart that he was not large enough to bear such a burden' - which is to say, the other most effective resistance is a sense of weakness: 'He'd spot me and cow me... He'd spot me, pretty quick, if I put the Ring on now, in Mordor.' The delicate balance is between knowing that one is too weak to withstand the Ring/the Enemy and still having to will to keep going, a will strong enough that the Ring cannot manipulate the fear that naturally accompanies a sense of weakness. Sam's love** of Frodo strengthens his will, so that fear for himself becomes unimportant; and his sense of his own weakness against the Ring protects him from being seduced by its clumsy manipulations (even reinforced by gnawing and torment).
**The reason that the Ring cannot manipulate Sam's love of Frodo is that love, which is a relationship between two or more beings, is beyond its awareness; it is a severed part that seeks to achieve a union which obliterates the difference between beings. The recognition of an unassimilable other, and thus the possibility of relationship, are simply beyond it.
What is 'such a burden'? While the Ring is repeatedly referred to as a burden, I think that here he means the burden of exercising power over others: 'The one small garden of a free gardener was all his need and due, not a garden swollen to a realm; his own hands to use, not the hands of others to command.' But he also acknoweldges that his will is not mighty enough to tame the Ring; indeed, the idea that it might be puts him in danger. He is stronger against it when he feels small.*
Sam 'had only to two choices; to forbear the Ring, though it would torment him; or the claim in and challenge the Power...Already the Ring tempted him, gnawing at his will and reason' -which is to say, attempting to drive him mad - with '[w]ild fantasies' of himself as 'Hero of the Age'. Here madness is connected with believing what is not true, and acting on those false beliefs, doing what one would otherwise know to be wrong, and which brings disaster upon oneself. This describes Boromir and Denethor as well, and combines two senses of madness: acting against one's own standards and causing one's own death.
* After realizing that 'he was not large enough to bear such a burden. . . With a shrug of his shoulders, as if to shake off the shadows and dismiss the phantoms, he began slowly to descend. With each step he seemed to diminish.' Thus the sense of a shadow is connected with his own sense of himself in relation to the Ring; when he feels himself powerful against it, he opens himself to its power and feels enlarged but distorted - not himself; in accepting it as 'nothing but a drag and a burden' he becomes 'a very small and frightened hobbit', which he is, but he then ignores the strength of of his own will, even while acting on that will.
This is dizzifying enough to give some hint at the similar (but not identical) process that Frodo has been going through, having to strengthen his will constantly without letting the Ring use that strength against him, so that he needs the hobbit-sense to recognize his own weakness and fear; he needs both the conviction of hopelessness and the determination to keep trying.
'He'd spot me, pretty quick, if I put the Ring on now, in Mordor.' The commas in this seem to indicate many pauses between small thoughts, as if setting it out takes a certain effort - in contrast to the preceding and following sentences: 'And anyway all these notions are only a trick' and 'Well, all I can say is: things look as hopeless as a frost in spring.' Perhaps it is not difficulty in conceptualizing, but a way of emphasizing the importance of each term, that motivates the pauses.
'But just as he was about to pass under its great arch he felt a shock: as if he had run into some we like Shelob's, only invisible. He could see no obstacle, but something too strong for his will to overcome barred the way' - not his physical strength, but his will. For his second attempt to get past the Watchers, '[h]ardening his will, Sam thrust forward once again, and halted with a jerk, staggering as if from a blow... Then, greatly daring, because he could think of nothing else to do, answering a sudden thought that came to him' -from the Unnamed Actor? from the Phial itself? Regardless, Sam is still/again open to being guided - 'he slowly drew out the phial of Galadriel. . . .slowly he felt their will waver and crumble into fear.' This affirms Sam's intuition that the Watcher's will alone blocked his entrance.
'[T]he great elf-warrior has called, with his elf-sword too!' Sting really is of Elvish make, but Sam isn't. Unlike the shadowy enlargement that he felt before, Sam feels no need to reject the identity given by the orcs.
'Terror began to grip him now. . . He would have welcomed a fight. . .He forced himself to think of Frodo.' Even without any Shelob-induced time effects, sheer fear is 'almost more than he could screw himself to face' - the same fear that made some of Aragorn's soldiers unable to even enter the plain before the Black Gate.
'Someone was running in great haste down an echoing stairway overhead.' The narrator - Sam's later self-judgement? or his experience at the time? - says that 'His will was too weak and slow to restrain his hand. It dragged at the chain and clutched the Ring.' The Ring is trying to get itself put on, and Sam is unable to keep his hand out of its control - like Frodo's hand putting it back into his pocket when he meant to throw it into the Bag End fire. Sam's general openness to guidance may also make him vulnerable to the Ring's direct physical manipulation - or the two may be unrelated; I rather think they are, since the physical bonding seems much the same for each bearer, as opposed to the attempted mental manipulation, which varies in the extreme. Again, this hints at what Frodo experiences as the Ring gets stronger closer to Mount Doom and is able to bypass his will and control his body directly (through the instantly-established physical bond that keeps each bearer from aging).
The physical effect, which is constant for all bearers, may be the germ of truth behind Shippey's otherwise inaccurate addiction theory. But I don't think that the physical effect is addictive: Neither Frodo nor Sam seems to experience anything like Bilbo's passing wistfulness for the Ring after its destruction - which is again different from both its apparent effect on him at Rivendell and Gollum's constant craving. All of these are manifestations of personality rather than of physical dependency.
In Woody End, when Frodo was not yet able to keep from putting on the Ring under the Nazgul's command, he was interrupted by Gildor and the other Elves. Sam here is interrupted by an orc, which has of its own nature no power against the Ring, but which seems to break the Ring's control over Sam: 'But Sam did not put it on; for even as he clasped it to his his breast, an orc came clattering down.' I don't know how seriously to take the implication that Sam would have been unable to keep from putting on the Ring.
The description of what the orc sees, in a chapter entirely from Sam's point of view, might be reconstructed: 'It stopped short aghast. For what it saw was not a small frightened hobbit trying to hold a steady sword; it saw a great silent shape, cloaked in a grey shadow, looming against the wavering light behind; in one hand it held a sword, the very light of which was a bitter pain, the other was clutched at its breast, but held concealed some nameless menace of power and doom. For a moment the orc crouched, and then with a hideous yelp of fear it turned and fled'. Compare to the description of his advantages against Shagrat below.*
Here Sam does not feel powerful over the Ring, rather he feels overpowered by it, and 'a small frightened hobbit'. There is no sign that he feels the cloaking shadow - a sign of power; he only sees the effect of that power on the orc. The power is connected (in ways not properfly defined) with the Ring, but in a eucatastrophic reversal it becomes manifest as a threat to one of the servants of evil.
For Sam, in Mordor, the power of the Ring manifests as making him big, but there is no sign of this being true for any other bearer at any time or place. It gives each bearer power 'according to his stature' as Gandalf said of Gollum; it may be an individual trick of Sam's mind that he experiences that power AS stature.
'He's got past the Watchers, and that's tark's work' meaning that a Man, not an Elf, is more likely to get past them, at least according to Snaga. I wonder why.
Shagrat killed his old buddy Gorbag, who was trying to kill him, in a fight over an object that does not even bond with its bearer.
*Sam 'did what was probably the best thing he could have done. He sprang out to meet Shagrat with a shout. He was no longer holding the Ring, but it was there, a hidden power, a cowing menace to the slaves of Mordor; and in his hand was Sting, and its light smote the eyes of the orc like the glitter of cruel stars in the elf-countries, the dream of which was a cold fear to all his kind.' The only thing missing in this description is the shadow. Is it to be assumed here? Is there any reason it should not be? Is it implicit in the Ring being there?
'Sam ran after him, cursing'. Having commited himself to fighting Shagrat, he could not un-commit - except for 'the thought of Frodo. . ."[I]t's my job to go right up to the top first, whatever happens afterwards."' Love, will, and the job he has known he had to do since Woody End are all united to force him to find out what he may not want to know.
'He cared no longer for Shagrat or Snaga or any other orc that was ever spawned. He longer only for his master, for one sight of his face or one touch of his hand.' In the earlier draft, this was expressed in the verses of Sam's song that didn't get into the final draft. Here it is only one line, but still there: a desire for physical intimacy - not reducible to sexual or non-sexual - and Sam's last feeling before 'feeling finally defeated'.
'[A]t the vain end of his long journey and his grief, moved by what thought in his heart he could not tell' - again, Sam is being guided, and he knows tht it is through his heart - 'Sam begin to sing. His voice sounded thin and quavering...forlorn and weary. . .He murmured...fleeting glimpses of the country of his home. And then suddenly new strength rose in him' - either from himself or a gift - 'and his voice rang out, while words of his own came unbidden' - which is a bit of an oxymoron; they are his words, but coming apparently of their own volition (which may be an insight into JRR's process of writing as well) - 'to fit the simple tune.' The words are of 'western lands', 'Elven-stars', 'stars forever dwell' - an evocation of Valinor, where he and Frodo are forever connected. I don't think that this is deliberate on Sam's part, since he has only begun to intuit Frodo's eternal existence as 'one who has passed the shadows'; rather I think it is part of the same intuition. The words shape themselves to an evolving understanding, perhaps influenced by some feeling for where the new strength is coming from.
'He thought that he heard a faint voice answering him. . .and Sam, now peering over the corner' - with what surge of hope! - 'saw a flicker of light' as if in answer to the assertion of light in his song.
'"Am I still dreaming?" he muttered. "But the other dreams were horrible."' - Frodo applying reason to even the most unforeseeable of circumstances.
'Sam felt like he could sit like that in endless happiness; but it was not allowed' - by the needs of the quest, the job he had to do - 'It was not enough for him to find his master; he still had to try and save him' - thus also his love for Frodo requires action. For his own part, having his one wish, Sam could have died right there with Frodo - and death awaits - but he chooses both the quest and life (as far as he can).
'Where are we? How did I get here?' These are not the usual hobbit question on waking - 'What time is it?' Is this a sign that the time-distortion has made such questions irrelevant, or that Frodo's frame of reference has shifted irrevocably from the Shire, the 'decent place' in which times have meaning? Wondering about their immediate situation constitutes being back on duty, like Sam, as does: 'You must tell me all about it, if we get a chance. Something hit me, didn't it?'
'I fell into darkness and foul dreams' - how Frodo remembers Shelob's poison - which looks forward to his later seemind 'half in a dream' on the anniversary of the poisoning.
'then two great brutes came and questioned me, questioned me until I thought I should go mad' - and lose track of what is real and what is lies? and do what I knew to be wrong? and do what I know to be suicidal? Frodo surely assumed that the orcs, who had 'taken everything', had the Ring, and that anything which allowed them to identify it would hasten Sauron's getting it, so he must have told them nothing for fear that anything might be a clue. If he held his tongue then, thinking that the Ring was in the hands of the enemy, and he himself quite likely doomed, it was not from any hope of being able to get the Ring back, rather out of the knowledge that neither he nor the orcs controlled everything that might yet happen. It was also a matter of remaining faithful under even the most hopeless of circumstances, as he had already set and disciplined his will to do. Does 'fingering their knives. I'll never forget their claws and their eyes' mean that going mad might mean being conscious only of knives, claws and eyes - the immediate threatening circumstances - and forgetting his purpose in having come this far at all?
'You won't if you talk about them, Mr. Frodo.' This may be a general hobbit idea, but it is also Sam's response to the immediate need to get out of there: 'And if you don't want to see them again, the sooner we get going the better. Can you walk?' While not out of character for Sam, neither is it an idea that he otherwise expresses, nor is he unwilling later, when there is time, to tell Frodo what he went though. However the text doesn't record Sam's account to Frodo, so we can't know what was directly described and what he only hinted at.
Frayach points out that Frodo usually tries to spare others details of whatever terrors he might experience; 'It was horrible. I do not with to talk about it' is more his style. The fact that he tells Sam so much is unique to both his relationship with Sam and his being in an afraid-of-going mad state. This probably connects with his telling Sam about the Wheel of Fire on Mount Doom.
'You won't if you talk about them' is pretty much how all hobbits deal with the experiences of which Merry says, in The Houses of Healing, ‘But it is the way of my people to use light words at such times and say less than they mean. We fear to say too much. It robs us of the right words when a jest is out of place.’ They don’t speak much of the depths or the heights, except in the overtones and undertones of tales or songs.
I think that here - aside from the need to get Frodo up and out of there - Sam was invoking the tried and true hobbit way of keeping bad experiences from taking over one’s whole consciousness. Frodo and Sam never avoid talking about the grim or horrible things that they have to talk about, but going over those particular past events is not necessary and may be harmful.
'it looked to Sam as if he was clothed in flame: his naked skin was scarlet in the light of the lamp above.' The Phial made Sam's hand shine red in Shelob's Lair: 'he closed his hand about the precious Phial which he still bore. Red with his own living blood his hand shone for a moment'. At that point Frodo was 'already ... some twenty strides ahead, flitting on like a shadow; soon he would be lost to sight in that grey world.' Now Frodo is regained. Then the Phial was the light in darkness; now, for Sam, it's Frodo.
Another thought about Frodo seeming 'clothed in flame': The Ring will soon become the Wheel of Fire and Frodo's appearing firey (to eyes that can see) could be a sign of some connection with it. But at this point Frodo has neither posession nor necessarily even consciousness of the Ring, which has not yet manifested in connection with fire. The Secret Fire is the animating principle of all Arda; perhaps this is what Sam sees in Frodo here.
Frodo defines failure: 'the quest has failed, Sam. . .we can't escape. Only Elves can escape. Away, away out of Middle-Earth, far over the Sea. If even that is wide enough to keep the Shadow out.' Failure is either (#1) losing the Ring before there is any chance to destroy it or (#2) the enemy taking it ('they've taken everything'). Therefore: If Frodo, not the Enemy, has the Ring, the quest has not failed - even if the Ring is not destroyed. Success means keeping it away from the Enemy. This definition is quite likely situtational, since the goal is still its (impossible) destruction, but within a long-enduring situation.
'And it hasn't failed, not yet,' says Sam - usually characterized as an eternal optimist, despite the 'not yet'. Tolkien calls him 'a cheerful hobbit' who could therefore get along without hope 'as long as despair could be postponed', a subtlety lost on those who think he is therefore optimistic; it is a matter of disposition rather than habit of thinking.
'I took it, begging your pardon' - which is not just a stock phrase here but a genuine request.
'And I've kept it safe' - meaning safe from the Enemy and also not used with any evil purpose, but kept with Frodo's own intent.
'Sam felt reluctant to give up the Ring and burden his master with it again.' It has already bonded with him physically, and he wants to spare Frodo. The physical bond is its basic method of attachment, but can it use his feelings about Frodo? It uses, or tries to use, anything it can, but is this accessible to it? Sam generally is not; the image of 'Samwise the Strong, hero of the age' is a very poor fit to him, despite being based on some of his thoughts.
In Many Meeetings, it is only the sight of the Ring that seems to make a change in Bilbo: 'a shadow seemed to have fallen between them, and through it he found himself eyeing a little wrinkled creature with a hungry face and bony groping hands. He felt a desire to strike him.' This is entirely in Frodo's point of view; Bilbo 'looked quickly at Frodo's face and passed his hand across his eyes'. We never find out what he might have seen or felt except regret for Frodo's having to 'carry on the story.'
Here, it is only when Sam brings up 'walking in the Black Land in nought but your skin' that Frodo even remembers the Ring. This argues against it having any effect on him from even a very small distance. The knowledge that Sam has it, rather than the presence of sight of the Ring, makes the difference.
'"You've got it?" gasped Frodod. "You've got it here? Sam, you're a marvel!" Then quickly and strangely his tone changed. "Give it to me!" he cried, standing up, holding out a trembling hand. "Give it to me at once! You can't have it!"' This is Frodo's response to the knowledge that Sam has the Ring, not to the sight of it. Cara thinks that his ability to keep going depends so much on Sam, a separate person with whom he can be in relationship, as opposed to the Ring's constant attempt to merge with him, that he cannot tolerate any blurring between Sam and the Ring, or between Sam and the Ring-bearer.
Sam '[s]lowly ... drew out the Ring and passed the chain over his head' explaining that 'in the land of Mordor, , , You'll find the Ring very dangerous now, and very hard to bear. If it's too hard a job, I could share it with you, maybe?' Sharing does not seem like a thought accessible to the Ring at all, so I suspect it to be entirely Sam's.
If I thought the Ring could tell one bearer from the next, I might think that it would prefer Sam, or anybody at all, to Frodo who has been so successful in resisting it, but does it recognize a multiplicity of entities outside of itself and whoever it is currently trying to merge with? It got itself lost from both Isuldur and Gollum. I am not sure what that implies about its consciousness however. When it got lost from Isildur, it lay in the bottom of a river for centuries afterwards, which hardly implies seeking a new bearer. That it got off Gollum's island implies some notion of place, but not of person. Gollum may be aware of it at a distance, but that is explicable in terms of his own ingrained desire, without its recognizing, acting on, or being acted on by him. The Ring is seeking to return to its master, but does it ever recognize that the current bearer is not its master? It can feel frustration or satisfaction with no notion at all of person - rather like a bacterium, I think.
'"No, no!" cried Frodo, snatching the Ring and chain from Sam's hands. "No you won't, you thief!" He panted, staring at sam with eyes wide with fear and emnity. Then suddenly, clasping the Ring in one clenched fist' - his charcteristic gesture of controlling it from FoTR - ' he stood aghast. A mist seemed to clear from his eyes' - which recalls the shadow that fell between Frodo and Bilbo - 'and he passed a hand over his aching brow' - as Bilbo passed a hand across his eyes. These parallels are surely purposeful. In each case, someone he loves seeks or has posession of the Ring, and in each case a shadow or mist causes Frodo to see them as other than themselves: He saw first Bilbo as something like Gollum, and now Sam as an orc.
The way he saw Bilbo could have been a direct effect of the Ring, which was in Frodo's posession, but here it is posession of the Ring that ends the hallucination: 'Sam had changed before his very eyes into an orc again, leering and pawing at his treasure.' This is not the way Frodo generally thinks of the Ring; the last time was in front of his fire in Bag End, when he said 'Bilbo went to find a treasure, there and back again, but I go to lose one, and not return.' The hallucination came to Frodo after Sam drew the Ring out, indicating that the sight of it in the posession of another affected him, as it apparently affected Bilbo in Many Meetings. This probably has something to do with its property of physically bonding with any bearer, and thus must hold for Gollum as well. Perhaps the sight of it - the visible violation of the physical bond - opened him to its influence, but he was able to (paradoxically) resist it once he resumed his role as bearer, the one who keeps it from mischief.
Frodo calls Sam a thief, which is what Bilbo (in An Unexpected Party) repeatedly told Gandalf that he wasn't. Frodo must know the true story of the finding of the Ring; it is on at Gloin that Bilbo 'looked sidelong' and asked forgiveness for telling another version earlier (in The Council of Elrond.) I suspect that Sam's having the Ring here calls Bilbo to Frodo's mind.
Bilbo (in An Unexpected Party) called the Ring 'precious' and 'my own.' Of course Bilbo never knew what it was. Frodo does not claim it, but only says that Sam can't have it.
When he was really captured by orcs, Frodo kept quiet. He though the orcs had the Ring, but he didn't see it. If he had seen it, would he have 'gone mad' and tried to snatch it back as he did from Sam?
Did the Ring - or at any rate the sight of the Ring - make Frodo 'go mad' and see an orc instead of Sam? His clasping it in a clenched fist - controlling it - brought him back to his senses. It is not a gesture that he has used in recent chapters; perhaps it is a way of asserting that he alone is the Ring-bearer rather than any direct response to the Ring.
When Sam rescued him - 'There was a orc with a whip, and then it turns into Sam!' - Frodo said he would 'never forget' the orcs' claws and eyes. Perhaps remembering what he feared would drive him mad is part of what drives him mad?
Madness here means confusing what is with what isn't, not being able to trust one's senses, distrusting where one should trust (which is a defining work of the Enemy.)
I hear Frodo's voice very hoarse in this scene. I think it must be from the orc-draught on top of going thirsty so long.
'"O Sam!" cried Frodo. "What have I said? What have I done?"' I don't think these questions are rhetorical. Frodo doesn't remember, but is judging only from Sam's reaction - 'wrung with pain, as if he had been stabbed in the heart'. Whatever he did, he is sure the Ring was behind it: 'It is the horrible power of the Ring. . . You can't come between me and this doom.' Are these two statements synonymous? Possible restatements: The Ring is (#1) what I must protect you from; it has already bonded to you. (#2) the reason I/Bilbo treated you/me that way. (#3) my doom, not yours (This is the answer to 'I could share it with you, maybe?').
'I understand' - probably all of the above - 'But I can still help, can't I?" Sam says, with determination. Does he really think that the Ring's claim on Frodo might be enough to exclude him? I think this is more his way ot steering Frodo back to the task of getting out of the Tower: 'I've got to get you out of here. At once, see!' Not 'we' but 'I' and 'you'. Sam needs to make decisions for them both now, because the horrible power of the Ring - the only thing Frodo is now wearing - can destroy Frodo's judgement. Sam supplies both plan and password.
'You lent me Sting, if you remember, and the Lady's glass.' Sam leaves open the possibility that Frodo was conscious and remembers him taking Sting.
'Frodo sat for a while and shivered, dreadful fears chasing one another through his mind.' But by the time Sam returns his humor is back: 'Aren't we going to match?'
Frodo makes sure that Sam eats and drinks: 'Here, take this elven-cake, and drink the last drop in your bottle! The whole ting is quite hopeless, so it's no good worrying about tomorrow. It probably won't come.' 'Hopeless' is to be Frodo's watchword in Mordor; perhaps it helps him keep going into ever-increasing fear.
The eastern border of Shelob's realm: 'To move an inch forward was a pain and weariness to will and limb.'
'"I got through, and I'm going to get out.". . . Sam drew out the elven-glass of Galadriel again. As if to do honour to his faithful brown hobbit-hand that had done such deeds, the phial blazed forth suddenly, so that all the shadowy court was lit with a dazzling radiance like lightning; but it remained steady and did not pass. "Gilthoniel, A Elbereth!" Sam cried. For, why he did not know' - which is Sam's watchword.