Quotes from Christopher A. Snyder

This is the hour of the Shire-folk," declares Elrond, "when they arise from their quiet fields to shake the towers and counsels of the Great.

We are increasingly abandoning Aristotle's view of paideia—learning and habituating virtues for personal flourishing and the common good—in favor of technical-instrumental education leading to private wealth for some, argues philosopher Richard Eldridge: "to abandon the cultivation of virtues and instead to teach only in order to produce measurable outcomes is to capitulate to an individualist culture of instrumental control and private satisfactions."44

Ancient virtues may lay for many years dormant. It does not mean that they are dead. We Hobbits need merely discover them, plant them in new soil, tend our little garden with care, and wait with sunlit hope for them to spring leaf and flower again in a new age.

Sam's constant deference and humility make many modern readers uncomfortable with its connotations of class difference, and in Peter Jackson's films this differential between Frodo and Sam is softened a bit.