The Land of Shadow
This year the @tolksoc chose the theme "Unlikely hero" for Tolkien Reading Day (25.3.) Every year I try to paint a thematic illustration and I chose the hobbit character Samwise Gamgee. A simple, loyal hobbit. But without Sam, Frodo would not have been able to complete his task.
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Far above the Ephel Dúath in the West the night-sky was still dim and pale. There, peeping among the cloud-wrack above a dark tor high up in the mountains, Sam saw a white star twinkle for a while. The beauty of it smote his heart, as he looked up out of the forsaken land, and hope returned to him. For like a shaft, clear and cold, the thought pierced him that in the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was light and high beauty for ever beyond its reach.
J.R.R. Tolkien, Lord of the Rings - The Return of the King, (book IV, chapter II - The Land of Shadow)
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This scene in The Return of the King is one of the most powerful in all of The Lord of the Rings.
I actually only realized it when I was working on this illustration - the similarity and parallel to the memories that Tolkien had from the World War I. In the book, it says that Sam and Frodo sleep under a canopy of brambles. Barbed wire from the trenches. The almost dead landscape around. The inspiration for the character of Sam - a simple English soldier.
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'My Sam Gamgee is indeed a reflection of the English soldier, of the privates and batmen I knew in the 1914 war, and recognized as so far superior to myself.'
The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien
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