24 Years Later, This Fantasy Quote Is Still The Best Of All Time

The fantasy genre as a whole is full of wonderful quotes. Books, television, film, and every other sort of media possible, stretching back decades, have brought us story after story defined by imagination and whimsy. While these adventures vary in tone, fantasy stories often revolve around themes of hope, self-discovery, desperation, and the battle between good and evil. As the characters embark on their journeys, the lessons they learn are shaped into powerful, inspiring, poignant, bittersweet, and immortally beautiful words.

This naturally makes it pretty difficult to choose only one quote as the very best in all fantasy. We’ve had some real whoppers in media like Harry Potter (“Happiness can be found, even in the darkest of times, if one only remembers to turn on the light“), J.M. Barries’ Peter Pan (“The moment you doubt whether you can fly, you cease for ever to be able to do it“), or Star Wars (“Do, or do not. There is no try“). However, there is one quote in particular that seems to capture the very essence of fantasy:

By rights we shouldn’t even be here, but we are. It’s like in the great stories, Mr. Frodo. The ones that really mattered. Full of darkness and danger they were, and sometimes you didn’t want to know the end, because how could the end be happy. How could the world go back to the way it was when so much bad happened? But in the end, it’s only a passing thing, this shadow. Even darkness must pass. A new day will come and when the sun shines it will shine out the clearer. Those were the stories that stayed with you – that meant something even if you were too small to understand why. But I think, Mr. Frodo, I do understand. I know now. Folk in those stories had lots of chances of turning back only they didn’t because they were holding on to something.

Sam Gamgee’s The Lord Of The Rings Quote Is The Perfect Reflection Of The Fantasy Genre

The above quote comes, of course, from Sean Astin’s Sam Gamgee in the 2002 movie The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers. It’s a powerful monologue that came at a time when Frodo and Sam’s journey reached its darkest point yet—though it would only get darker. When the pair started their adventure in The Fellowship of the Ring, things were much brighter and more hopeful. Frodo and Sam were afraid, but it seemed to both that this was their time to have a marvelous journey like Bilbo’s stories. By the end of The Two Towers, however, the tone had changed.

At this point in the story, Frodo felt completely hopeless. Sam used his monologue to remind his dear friend that, at least in the stories, the darkness always passes. When he tells Frodo that the heroes of these tales were “holding onto something,” Frodo asks what that something was. “That there’s some good in this world, Mr. Frodo,” he answered, “and it’s worth fighting for.”

This is, in truth, about as simple a sentiment as can be. However, this doesn’t change the fact that it is a perfect reflection of everything that the fantasy genre stands for. In a sense, Sam’s words are very meta. He’s a character in a fantasy movie, reminding viewers that the darkness of his story is just the same as the darkness in their own lives. Legendary author Terry Pratchett once said, “Fantasy is hardly an escape from reality. It’s a way of understanding it,” and Sam’s Lord of the Rings quote is an excellent example of just what he meant.

How Sam’s Quote Is Different In J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Two Towers Book

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Sam’s monologue at the end of Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers is unique to the film franchise. However, it’s very clearly inspired by a monologue written for Sam by J.R.R. Tolkien in his The Two Towers book. Just as in the movie, Sam and Frodo were exhausted and desperate, leading them to consider how they had ended up in such a dark place. Sam stated that the heroes of the best sorts of stories were placed on their paths by uncontrollable circumstances, just as he and Frodo were.

However, Sam ultimately points out that, like he and Frodo, those heroes had chances to turn back:

“I used to think that they were things the wonderful folk of the stories went out and looked for, because they wanted them, because they were exciting and life was a bit dull, a kind of a sport, as you might say. But that’s not the way of it with the tales that really mattered, or the ones that stay in the mind. Folk seem to have been just landed in them, usually – their paths were laid that way, as you put it. But I expect they had lots of chances, like us, of turning back, only they didn’t. And if they had, we shouldn’t know, because they’d have been forgotten.”

The sentiment here is much the same. Sam is pointing out that those beautiful, happy endings in the stories he and Frodo knew so well existed only because the heroes didn’t turn back. Yes, they didn’t choose their path, but they moved ever forward because they believed in something.

The Two Towers movie took this concept and stretched it out a bit, making it more understandable to a contemporary audience. The film’s version is a bit more dramatic, but it was a necessary shift to bring this second film in the Lord of the Rings franchise to a dark, desperate, but still hopeful close. Regardless, either version of Sam’s speech is a poignant reminder of how important fantasy is as a genre. The sprawling, fantastical adventures remind us that while we can’t always choose our path, we can choose to keep moving forward for the sake of all that beauty to come.

Release Date

December 18, 2002

Runtime

179 minutes