Sam and Frodo are just like Orpheus and Eurydice. Frodo is Eurydice, doomed to die — we’re repeatedly told, again and again, that Frodo is fated lose his life in the quest for the Ring. “In his heart Frodo begins to understand the Quest will claim his life,” Galadriel says, and she’s right. Frodo’s death is constantly foreshadowed, as if it’s inevitable; Frodo himself begins to feel it is inevitable. Because of the Ring he’s drawn irresistibly to the Dead City, to the dead faces in the marshes, and to his own self destruction and inevitable death.
But Sam is Orpheus. He acknowledges Frodo is fated to die but he refuses to let it happen. He journeys into the depths of hell, the depths of the underworld, to fight against that inevitability and steal Frodo back from death itself. On one side, you have the inevitability of Frodo’s death, which Frodo himself has accepted; you have all of destiny and fate and mortality; you have Frodo’s own growing weariness and even suicidality— and on the other side, you have one person who is in love with Frodo and wants him to live.
And Sam wins!
He does the impossible! He does the equivalent of making the God of Death weep with his song; in the book he even finds Frodo in the orc tower of Mordor while singing a song of hope, in what feels like a reference to Orpheus and Eurydice. He journeys where almost no man has ever gone before and he rescues the person he loves from the jaws of their inevitable death. He takes on all of destiny and fatality with nothing but his love, and he wins!
But even after all of that, they’re still parted.
Sam fell in love with someone who was doomed by the narrative, and he saved him from his fate, but now they can’t be together until he’s healed.
There’s so much hope in the end of Frodo and Sam’s story though, especially because Sam follows Frodo across the sea. They’re not parted forever; there’s so much hope that because Sam saved him they can now reunite, in another life, and that this time their story will end differently.
