🌺A Home and a Garden Of His Own

The temptation and triumph of Samwise Gamgee

Credit: New Line Cinema

When the eight remaining members of the Fellowship of the Ring first meet Galadriel and Celeborn in Caras Galadhon, Galadriel pronounces to them that “your Quest stands upon the edge of a knife. Stray but a little and it will fall, to the ruin of all. Yet hope remains while all the Company is true.”

She then “in silence looked searchingly at each of them in turn. None save Legolas and Aragorn could long endure her glance. Sam quickly blushed and hung his head.”¹

That evening, Pippin asks Sam why he blushed when the Lady held his gaze.

Sam replies, “If you want to know, I felt as if I hadn’t got nothing on, and I didn’t like it. She seemed to be looking inside me and asking me what I would do if she gave me the chance of flying back home to the Shire to a nice little hole with–with a bit of garden of my own.”

As he and the other members of the Company pondered the meaning of Galadriel’s qualifier “while all the Company is true,” Sam felt exposed before Galadriel’s gaze. Could he, a humble halfling gardener, possibly remain true on this perilous quest? If he had the choice to go back home to comfort and to a home and garden of his own,² would he remain by Frodo’s side or would he take the chance and return to the Shire?

Sam’s temptation by the prospect of home and a garden recurs on several other occasions during the narrative of The Lord of the Rings. Before the end of the Quest to destroy the Ring, Sam will be tempted at least twice more to leave Frodo and the Quest. Once, Galadriel again offers him a shocking vision of potential harm to his home, the Shire. And later on, the Ring itself shows Sam a vision of him ruling over a garden greater than any other if only he will just give up attempting to destroy the Ring and take it for himself.

Rather than let either vision turn him aside, Sam continues onward on his journey. What he finds is that by taking the long way home, he remains faithful to Frodo and the Quest and gets both the home he feared losing and the garden he desired for himself after all.

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