Q: Who Does Sam Marry in The Lord of the Rings?
ANSWER: Sam Gamgee marries Rosie Cotton in The Lord of the Rings. They have 13 children.
End of story, right?
Rosie is the daughter of Tom Cotton, whose father was the second cousin of Sam’s father Hamfast. The names in Sam’s family are a wealth of philological humor and roguish puns. Take “Tom Cotton”, for example. Tom is short for Thomas, which is an Aramaic name that was hardly used in England until after 1066. Cotton has been the family name for three generations, four counting Rosie and her brothers.
Thomas means “twin” and Tom Cotton did indeed have a brother, Wilcome, which might be a modernized form of Old English wilcuma, “welcome guest”. So one must wonder if Tom and Wilcome are twins or just brothers. There are no indisputable examples of twins among hobbit family genealogies.
The family name (“Cotton”) is generally determined to mean Cot + ton (“cottage” + “town”), which doesn’t make much sense. A surname derived from “cottage town” might look more like “Cottageton” or “Cottenton” or perhaps “Cothamton”. But the suffix -ton does not have to be derived from town. The Old English root for “town” is tun, which can mean “an enclosure”, “a garden”, “a field”, “a farm”, “a manor”, “a mansion”, or “a homestead”.
Now, in the appendix on names in The Lord of the Rings Tolkien wrote:
Cotton, in fact, represents Hlothran a fairly common village-name in the Shire, derived
from hloth- ‘a two-roomed dwelling or hole’, and ran(u) a small group of such dwellings on a hillside. As a surname it may be an alteration of hlothram(a) ‘cottager‘. Hlothram, which I have rendered Cotman, was the name of Farmer Cotton’s grandfather.
There is no direct parallel between Tolkien’s fictional etymology for Hlothran and the etymology for Cotton but one should observe that cot could also mean “a hut” or “small house” or “bedchamber”.
Hence, the surname Cotton could mean something like “farmer” in a roundabout way. The farmers of the Shire, you may recall, often lived above ground in houses or huts. The Cotton family may have been so named because they were humble farmers. In fact, the Cotton family house has an unspecified number of steps leading up to its front door.
And speaking of the Cottons, they lived in Bywater, did they not? Many people write that “Bywater” is a compound name meaning “by (the) water”, which seems very true given the town’s location (beside the little pond named The Water) but there is another possible meaning of which Tolkien should have been aware. The by- in “Bywater” could also derive from Old Norse byr, which means “town”. This is the root of the word bylaw (“town” + “law”). So Bywater could also mean “town (of the) water” or “water town”.
While it’s not necessary for Tolkien to have contrived such convoluted philological punishment for his readers, it does seem quite a propitious coincidence. Now, while you may have come here looking for the answer to “who does Sam marry in The Lord of the Rings“, don’t you agree this was a more interesting answer than you were expecting?
See Also:
And Now for the Other Love Story
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