As the “Gollum eats babies” part was already covered by another person, who admirably did a very good job of quoting it from memory, getting it mostly right, I’m going to feature another overlooked quote from Tolkien’s work, this time from The Return of the King.

In the chapter “The Grey Havens” the narrator, who we can assume at this point is Samwise, describes the blissful year of 1420 in The Shire, a year of prosperity, plenty, health and an unusual amount of blonde Hobbit children being born. Then, a very strange metaphor is used.

It seems odd for Tolkien to suddenly describe Hobbit children making piles of stones as like a conqueror piling skull of his enemies, and is an unusually dark metaphor to describe something that is supposed to come off as pastoral.

If one may surmise as to why such a chilling metaphor was used in a paragraph about eating strawberries and playing under trees, I once again may point out that the narrator at this point in the story is Samwise, who has seen some things no Hobbit ever thought he may. While Frodo practically succumbed to the horrors of his journey, and was deeply traumatized, Sam seems to shake it off, but the key word there is seems.

Sam is taking a route to deal with what he’s been through that you may see in a lot of people who have seen the horrors of war, something Tolkien was no stranger to, gallows humor.