The Lord Of The Ring: 10 Things You Didn't Know About The Fellowship

Despite the plethora of heroic and brave characters in Tolkien's literature, it was the humble and ever loyal Samwise Gamgee who was considered the greatest hero. Without his single-minded determination to loyally assist Frodo, the Ring would never have been destroyed.

Tolkien was famous for his disdain of allegory. He dismissed suggestions that Sauron symbolically represented Hitler, or that the evil of the Ring was a stand in for fascism. Of this topic Tolkien said: "I think that many confuse applicability with allegory, but the one resides in the freedom of the reader, and the other in the purposed domination of the author.” Meaning he did not intend for his writings to represent anything in particular, but was happy for his readers to interpret it at their will.

This doesn't mean Tolkien wasn't inspired by real world events, though. He lived through both World Wars, and fought during the first. He based the relationship of Sam and Frodo on the young officers and the privates who served them. Tolkien was himself an officer, but saw the young privates as far superior, braver and more heroic than himself and the other officer they served. Sam was his way of honouring those men.