From: "Andy Robertson" <andywrobertson@clara.co.uk>
Subject: Re: (urth) Wolfe, Tolkien, Brooks...
Date: Wed, 2 Jan 2002 22:32:50 -0000

It's not the master-servant relationship: it's a war-leader -
warband-follower relationship.   Achilles and Patroclus.   A vital facet of
Anglo-Saxon poetry.

Of course the LOTR subsumes the fact that the english master-servant
relationship is a modern fossil of this.

Thus as Sam and Frodo move from the "domestic" Shire to the "heroic" outer
world their relationship mutates, taking on its archaic configuration.






----- Original Message -----
From: "Dan'l Danehy-Oakes" <ddanehy@siebel.com>
one of my favorite
> characters: the very _essence_ of Samwise Gamgee in Tolkien is that his
> relation to Frodo is an idealization of the Master-Servant relationship
> - the British class system "as it should have been." And that's totally
> gone from the movie, dammit.
>