AUTHOR'S NOTES -
CHAPTER 10: SYMPATHY AND UNDERSTANDING
She did not want to read or write letters for her father. It wasn’t as though he couldn’t do it himself, but his reading was painfully slow, as he traced a finger under each word, and his writing looked like a tipsy spider had been let loose with the ink pot.
In The Letters of JRR Tolkien (No. 246) Tolkien talks about the Cotton family being an illustration of what Sam would have been without his education by Bilbo. This does not, in my mind, necessarily mean the Cotton family could not read and write. Being able to keep rudimentary farm ledgers does not make Tom Cotton educated, he still has - in Tolkien’s words - a “mental myopia” and a “readiness to measure and sum up all things from a limited experience, largely enshrined in sententious traditional ‘wisdom.’”
As for Rosie Cotton’s greater grasp of the written word, no doubt Sam shared some of his knowledge with her.
“Grab a chance,” her father always said. “Grab a chance, and you’ll not be sorry for a might-have-been.”
A little plagiarism from Arthur Ransom and his Swallows and Amazons series. This is a motto of Captain Walker, father of the “Swallows” and a very good motto it is.
I think. Mr. Pippin called him the King’s friend, did you know that? I heard it from Fil at The Green Dragon. The King’s friend and most famous in all the West, or some such thing.
The Return of the King, The Scouring of the Shire: “This was too much for Pippin. His thoughts went back to the Field of Cormallen, and here was a squint-eyed rascal calling the Ring-bearer “little cock-a-whoop”... ‘I am a messenger of the King,’ he said. ‘You are speaking to the King’s friend, and one of the most renowned in all the lands of the West...’”
This exchange does indeed take place outside the Green Dragon, which is described as “lifeless, and with broken windows.” The landlord, Fil (short for Filibert?) may well have been hiding within.
And when they had their swords out all ready to do Sharkey a mischief, Mr. Frodo just said, “I will not have him slain”, quiet like, and they just sheathed their swords without a murmur. I saw that myself, I did.
The Return of the King, The Scouring of the Shire : “The hobbits recoiled. But Frodo said: ‘Do not believe him! He has lost all his power, save his voice that can still daunt you and deceive you, if you let it. But I will not have him slain. It is useless to meet revenge with revenge: it will heal nothing...’”
‘Promise me you won’t tell Sam.’
The Return of the King, The Grey Havens: “But the fit passed, and when Sam got back on the twenty-fifth, Frodo had recovered, and he said nothing about himself.”
It is hard to imagine that the Cotton family wouldn’t have told Sam of the illness, unless Frodo had asked them to promise not to.
And Gandalf warned me I may become like a clear vessel of light for “eyes to see who can.”
The Fellowship of the Ring, Many Meetings: “He was smiling, and there seemed to be little wrong with him. But to the wizards eye there was a faint change, just a hint as it were of transparency, about him, and especially about the left hand that lay outside upon the coverlet.
‘Still that must be expected,’ said Gandalf to himself. ‘He is not half through yet, and to what he will come in the end not even Elrond can foretell. Not to evil, I think. He may become like a glass filled with clear light for eyes to see that can.
‘Oh, enough to rival my great-grandfather Gerontius,’ he said.
The Return of the King, Appendix C: Gerontius Took (The Old Took) had twelve children, including, of course, Bilbo’s mother, Belladonna, and Frodo’s grandmother, Mirabella.
History of Middle-earth, vol. 9, Sauron Defeated, The Epilogue: “...for Samwise and Rosie seemed likely to rival old Gerontius Took as successfully in the number of their children as Bilbo had in the number of his years.”