Why didn't Sam ask Rosie for a dance? Funny answers only!
Ever read The Nature of Middle-earth?
If you'd never heard of it, it's a book I encountered when trawling Hobbiton's gift shop. Turns out the Hobbiton movie set is one hell of an industrial tourist attraction. It's ginormous. It's lucrative. It shunts and sloshes a billion busloads of tourists through its Hobbit-y civic cisterns daily at $120 a pop. It's a massive money-maker. My gal and I visited in January 2025. I took a gazillion photos. Here's one:
I snapped this standing ten metres to the left of Bag End. You can see multiple tourist busloads swarming hither and thither. That ginormous tree at centre-right is none other than the Party Tree; that collection of buildings at the extreme right is the Green Dragon; and the structure slightly below it and closer is one end of Bagshot Row. It's a delightful place.
But pricey. Afterwards I browsed Hobbiton's gift shop, encountered The Nature of Middle-earth, bought it, returned home, attempted to read it, and gave up after about ten pages. Why? From what I can tell, it's a reattempt at Unfinished Tales, a book collection of stories and essays by Tolkien, about Middle-earth, that, for whatever reason, never made it into publications elsewhere.
Unfinished Tales is a delight. The Nature of Middle-earth is a dreary slog. It seems its makers said "okay this LotR malarkey is printing orgasmic money for us all; Unfinished Tales is selling like hot cakes; surely we can scrape together yet another collection of Tolkien's materials and flog that too? What's left? Anything? Anything at all?"
The parts I browsed largely featured snippets like "we think Tolkien's Letter #3435243 MIGHT have 'Numenorians suck nads' written in the margin of page 3 in really really faint pencil but it honestly might just be a drawing of the Kaiser playing hopscotch."
This persisted for dozens of pages. Ugh. I couldn't be bothered. For the most part Nature seemed beyond pointless.
With one glorious exception: it contained the full and unexpurgated relationship history of Sam and Rosie.
Which brings us to this question's answer.
For turns out that, at the start of Fellowship, Sam and Rosie had already got together, married and divorced. Six times in a row. Rosie's most recent reason for breaking up with Sam was, she'd dated vastly too many knucklehead dragon-slayer brainless douchebags to find the archetype remotely appealing any more. Sam now provoked zero heart-throbs. Sam was only giving this whole Gardening lark a go because Middle-Earth had run out of dragons for him to throat-slit. Turns out gardening mellowed him. And Sam's most recent reason for breaking up with Rosie was, oh sure, her barmaid cocktail mixing was orgasmic, her home cooking was orgasmic, her performance in the sack was orgasmic, but her dancing was apocalyptic.
If Rosie ever tried to twirl, she'd unwittingly fling cutlery into peoples' eye sockets. Her can-can-ning once caused a host of Noldor Elves to go into cerebral haemorrhaging and bleed from the nostrils and anus. Her body-popping invariably gives Eru Ilúvatar leprosy of the perineum. She's the only bit of Eru's Music more unpredictable than Tom Bombadil playing freeform jazz. Sam had to flee for the hills if for no other reason than simple self-preservation.
The pair tied the knot a seventh time after Rosie realised that Sam's new-found gardening obsessions, combined with his experiences lugging Frodo up Mt. Doom, had upgraded him into the first bloke she'd ever met who could finally combine ultra-macho Adventuring with refraining from being a bombastic, one-dimensional asshole. And Sam figured that whenever a Hobbiton dance threatened to kick off, he could just chain Rosie to the pub's bar or something, and lay and set multiple lines of bear traps between her and the dance floor, and perhaps purchase one of Saruman's old stab-proof vests, and he might get away with only losing a limb or three.