A tweet from a few days ago:
https://twitter.com/tolkienguide/status/1435064827861291009
Guides to action, ranked
People weren’t coming up with good ones in the replies. (The best was from “The Homecoming of Beorthnoth”, which is a pretty deep cut.)
This is weird, because Sam Gamgee in Book VI of LotR is pretty much the personification of determination and perseverance. Examples of those qualities are plenty, but quotable lines are not to be found. Tolkien loved updating proverbs, or coining them where no traditional wisdom was available [1], so how can this be?
I verified the emergent conclusion of the twittersphere: Book VI from Cirith Ungol to Mount Doom contains no proverbs from the good guys. The only character who says anything quotable is an Orc NCO: where there’s a whip, there’s a will. The domination of Sauron means not only the end of songs, but also of proverbial wisdom.
Or, in a more critical vein, we can call this one of the techniques by which Tolkien changed the mode of the story in Northrop Frye’s construction from Romance to Low Mimesis.
[1] A feature Tolkien’s works share with those of William Morris.
Earthoak
Interesting point! There is this quotation (I listed it as one of my three memorable quotations: https://earthandoak.wordpress.com/2015/03/25/best-quotations-from-the-lord-of-the-rings/ which is why I remembered it immediately)…From TTT:
“Frodo raised his head, and then stood up. Despair had not left him, but the weakness had passed. He even smiled grimly, feeling now as clearly as a moment before he had felt the opposite, that what he had to do he had to do, if he could, and that whether Faramir or Aragorn or Elrond or Galadriel or Gandalf or anyone else ever knew about it was beside the purpose.”
A bit long for a proverb, but ‘what he had to do he had to do’ might count.