A batman or orderly is a soldier or airman assigned to a commissioned officer as a personal servant. Before the advent of motorized transport, an officer's batman was also in charge of the officer's "
French aide-de-camp, Napoleonic Wars.
Batman (military) (1802–1812)
Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery with his batman, Corporal English, in 1943
Samwise Gamgee is a fictional character in J. R. R. Tolkien's Middle-earth. A hobbit, Samwise is the chief supporting character of The Lord of the Rings, serving as the loyal companion of the protagon
Batman (military)
…military service during World War I of the relationship between a batman and his officer informed how he wrote the relationship between the characters Samwise Gamgee and Frodo Baggins (introduced in The Fellowship of the Ring in 1954). The term batman replaced this in the inter-war years. Batmen were among the…
Frodo and Sam guided by Gollum through the Dead Marshes. Scraperboard illustration by Alexander Korotich, 1984
Frodo has been compared to Christ, and Sam, who carried Frodo on the way to Mount Doom, to Simon of Cyrene, who carried Christ's cross to Golgotha.
Sam's surname is from Sampson Gamgee, a Birmingham doctor who invented a surgical dressing; as a child, Tolkien knew the word "gamgee" as a name for cotton wool.