'but whyyy would tolkien shoehorn sam into a romantic relationship with rosie when it's so obvious that frodo's the most important person in his life?'
hear me out, what if...and this is a long shot...tolkien had lived through some deeply harrowing experiences that emphasised that people can love each other in different ways and they're all equally important? and that the strongest bonds you form aren't always explicitly romantic? what if everything in tolkien's work (eowyn's different loves for faramir and aragorn, boromir having no interest in romantic relationships and putting everything into his love for his city) fairly dripped with the idea that romance isn't the only important sort of love? what then?
Like, I *get* where people are coming from with this, I remember thinking that Sam and Frodo were not-very secretly in love when I was a teenager. Sam is even literally described as being driven by his love for Frodo in the books, and I, a dumbass, thought that had to be romantic love. But that was from my point of view as a teenage boy, back when I still thought that telling anyone other than your significant other that you loved them was somehow emasculating yourself. I am telling you now, as a guy in my mid-thirties, that I have very few friends, but those I have I would absolutely march into the den of a fuck-off huge spider to protect them, and I unashamedly love them, but, and this is important, I would never want to date or fuck them in a million years.
The English language has saddled us with a very limited range of words for the vast array of meanings that we collectively call “love”, and our culture has become very narrowly focused on romantic love as being the only “true” love.
Further, Tolkien lived through the first world war, but two of his oldest friends (part of their own private club of only four as school boys) didn’t. The Fellowship mirrors these experiences in many respects: they set out on a deeply perilous journey, they get separated, Gandalf and Boromir die (although Gandalf doesn’t stay dead), and while the remaining members return home more or less intact, none of them are really the same people they were when they left. Frodo eventually goes sailing west with the elves because his experiences had damaged him so much spiritually that he couldn’t live in Middle Earth any longer. Sam, for his part, manages to come back intact, gets married, and stays to raise a happy family despite the harrowing experiences he had and watching what those experiences and the ring did to his best friend. Although Tolkien got married shortly before going to war, and certainly didn’t come back “intact” (he caught trench fever and had the dubious fortune of being medically evacuated back to England shortly before most of his battalion got wiped out in the battle of the Somme), his journey and Sam’s mirror each other.
Tolkien dearly loved his wife, and he also loved his friends that he lost to the war. Neither of those loves diminished the other, they existed as separate and more-or-less equally important aspects of his life. Sam escorts Frodo on his journey to the sea, but doesn’t sail west with Frodo for the same reason. There’s no doubt that Frodo is incredibly dear to Sam, but that doesn’t make his wife and family suddenly mean nothing. Emotions are fucking complicated, and if you try to boil down the characterization to something as simple as “Sam was in love with Frodo, so obviously he shouldn’t have been shoehorned into a straight relationship”, you’re doing both yourself and the story a major disservice.
It can be deeply meaningful to do a romantic reading of Sam and Frodo. But, since Tolkien’s time, the boundaries of emotional expression in male friendships have constricted so much that some people’s first impression is that the relationship must be romantic. The greater limits on expressions of male friendship are in part reactionary homophobia as gay people gained more visibility: men could still be friends while blowing things up, but where was the basic human tenderness? So even celebrating the standard, by-the-book platonic reading is a challenge to our modern norms at this point.
I think it's also important to recognize love is not exclusionary.
Like: our society teaches us that jealous is a necessary, natural, and good part of love but it isn't any of those things; It's Bad, Actually; Love is NOT some Finite Resource you can run out of; it's NOT Selfish; and it's entirely possible, for instance, for Sam to love Frodo physically and romantically to -as he repeatedly does in the book- romanticize and eroticize Frodo's body and find him beautiful, and for him to ALSO have the ability to fully love, desire, eroticize, and romanticize another person.
Like: the above are all important points(though the cultural approbation of masculine affection over the 2nd half of the 20th century was NOT due to the growing visibility of gay ppl -gay ppl in the 50s and 60s were actl LESS visible than they had been for decades[maybe even a century] before then due to the VICIOUS culmination, in the period of the World Wars and early Cold War, of a long campaign of State-Driven political-homophobia wrapped up with, in my opinion, Nationalism, Political Christianity, and the ~Elite~-driven project to create and promote Nation-State Identities, which was as much about EXCLUDING particular demographics as it was about Defining the traits of each particular ~Nationality~. The ever-shrinking USian masculine emotional universe is a continuation and intensification of this campaign), but it's equally important to recognize that Sam's love for Frodo(which, imo, it is perfectly acceptable to read as romantic and sexual, and perfectly acceptable to read as not) does not negate his love for Rose. There is no competition, there is no restriction, there is no betrayal. It is entirely possible to love more than one person in a romantic and sexual way, and indeed I would argue that is the natural, healthy, and historically more common human emotional state. Jealousy is Poison, not Love, and Love is not a property-relation.
