(no subject)
I don't know why it struck me the way it did, but yesterday I realized anew that Sam Gamgee learned to read from Bilbo.
Tolkien, in his usual low-key way, tells us that while literacy is not confined to the hobbit upper-classes, it's also by no means universal. The Gaffer mentions that Bilbo "learned [Sam] his letters - meaning no harm, mark you, and I hope no harm will come of it." The Gaffer was illiterate. Sam may have been the only one out of six children to learn to read and write. And I had this lovely image of rich, upper-class Bilbo teaching the gardener's young son Sam the alphabet, letting him hold a pen (or would they have used a slate, since it's cheaper?) and giving him books of lore to read.
Sam was only eighteen when Bilbo left the Shire, a kid by hobbit standards. In the grand scheme of Middle Earth, he was the lowest of the low. Hobbits were unknown to Ents and ignored by Elves; Dwarves knew about them because the Shire was between two of their largest settlements. The only Men who knew about them were Northerners or Rohirrim, and Theoden admitted that they didn't even remember any stories about hobbits, only that they existed. Among hobbits, Sam was on the bottom rung of the social ladder. He was a gardener and the (youngest) son of a gardener, only important insofar as he was servant to a Baggins. Merry and Pippin were the heirs of their families, which were large and influential. Frodo bore his uncle's legacy. Sam was there almost by accident.
Yet, do you know, besides Frodo, Sam gets the biggest introduction? He's the second new major character to be mentioned (behind Frodo), and while Merry gets all of two lines in the first chapter (and Pippin gets a namecheck), Sam is described by his father in the first chapter, and then gets two whole conversations in the second. Yet he's still treated like comic relief, this uneducated daydreamer who really doesn't know what he just got himself into. So when RotK hits, and he bears up the crux of the plot with courage and perserverance and all-around awesomeness, boy are we surprised.
(I've always found it fascinating when, in "The Scouring of the Shire", we learn that Sam knew very well that he was going to be gone a long time, that he might not make it home, and that he had the foresight to tell all of this to his girlfriend. She was apparently the only person in the Shire besides Fredegar who knew the truth.)
So I worked from home today. Am I ever glad I'd saved my old computer mouse. The really annoying parts were that we couldn't use Excel (spreadsheets do a lot of work in our office) and the annoying lag time between my input and the response. Because working remotely means that everything I do is not processed by my computer, but by a CPU at work. But the system works, I got my stuff done, and next time I get snowed in, I don't have to worry.
Also, my apartment smells of pumpkin. ::evil laugh::
Tolkien, in his usual low-key way, tells us that while literacy is not confined to the hobbit upper-classes, it's also by no means universal. The Gaffer mentions that Bilbo "learned [Sam] his letters - meaning no harm, mark you, and I hope no harm will come of it." The Gaffer was illiterate. Sam may have been the only one out of six children to learn to read and write. And I had this lovely image of rich, upper-class Bilbo teaching the gardener's young son Sam the alphabet, letting him hold a pen (or would they have used a slate, since it's cheaper?) and giving him books of lore to read.
Sam was only eighteen when Bilbo left the Shire, a kid by hobbit standards. In the grand scheme of Middle Earth, he was the lowest of the low. Hobbits were unknown to Ents and ignored by Elves; Dwarves knew about them because the Shire was between two of their largest settlements. The only Men who knew about them were Northerners or Rohirrim, and Theoden admitted that they didn't even remember any stories about hobbits, only that they existed. Among hobbits, Sam was on the bottom rung of the social ladder. He was a gardener and the (youngest) son of a gardener, only important insofar as he was servant to a Baggins. Merry and Pippin were the heirs of their families, which were large and influential. Frodo bore his uncle's legacy. Sam was there almost by accident.
Yet, do you know, besides Frodo, Sam gets the biggest introduction? He's the second new major character to be mentioned (behind Frodo), and while Merry gets all of two lines in the first chapter (and Pippin gets a namecheck), Sam is described by his father in the first chapter, and then gets two whole conversations in the second. Yet he's still treated like comic relief, this uneducated daydreamer who really doesn't know what he just got himself into. So when RotK hits, and he bears up the crux of the plot with courage and perserverance and all-around awesomeness, boy are we surprised.
(I've always found it fascinating when, in "The Scouring of the Shire", we learn that Sam knew very well that he was going to be gone a long time, that he might not make it home, and that he had the foresight to tell all of this to his girlfriend. She was apparently the only person in the Shire besides Fredegar who knew the truth.)
So I worked from home today. Am I ever glad I'd saved my old computer mouse. The really annoying parts were that we couldn't use Excel (spreadsheets do a lot of work in our office) and the annoying lag time between my input and the response. Because working remotely means that everything I do is not processed by my computer, but by a CPU at work. But the system works, I got my stuff done, and next time I get snowed in, I don't have to worry.
Also, my apartment smells of pumpkin. ::evil laugh::