How we cite our quotes: (Book.Chapter.Paragraph).
Quote #10
"Take any [tale] that you're fond of. You may know, or guess, what kind of a tale it is, happy-ending or sad-ending, but the people in it don't know. And you don't want them to."
"No, sir, of course not. Beren, now, he never thought he was going to get that Silmaril from the Iron Crown in Thangorodrim, and yet he did, and that was a worse place and a blacker danger than ours. But that's a long tale, of course, and goes on past the happiness and into grief and beyond it—and the Silmaril went on and came to Eärendil. And why, sir, I never thought of that before! We've got—you've got some of the light of it in that star-glass that the Lady gave you! Why, to think of it, we're in the same tale still! It's going on. Don't the great tales never end?"
"No, they never end as tales," said Frodo. "But the people in them come, and go when their part's ended. Our part will end later—or sooner." (4.8.60-2)
Sam's sudden epiphany about his and Frodo's connection to the tales of Beren and Eärendil underlines the incredibly complex, multi-layered character of Tolkien's own mythology. Before even writing The Lord of the Rings cycle, Tolkien had already worked out the mythology of Middle-earth in the form of the Silmarillion. So Frodo and Sam are both "in the same tale" not only because they have inherited the fight against evil more generally, but also because Tolkien has created this closed circuit of tale-telling, in which even the characters in his own novels have read the rest of his fiction. Wow.