I’m not usually one to dress up for Halloween, but this year I decided to go as one of my favorite female characters from The Lord of the Rings: Rosie Cotton.

You’d think that Eowyn or Arwen would have been my choice for a Halloween character, but that would have been a little too obvious. Besides, Arwen and Eowyn are the exceptional women in Tolkien’s male-dominated world. Rosie is the one whose story is less dramatic, but more real. Although she’s Samwise Gamgee’s true love, Rosie gets left behind when Sam and Frodo go off on their quest. She lives the life of an ordinary hobbit woman, and when Sam returns to the Shire, he and Rosie get married and have lots of hobbit kids.

Tolkien didn’t have much to say about Rosie and women like her (which is typical), but that gives the reader (and the fan fiction writer) plenty of opportunities for imagining her adventures.

Tolkien’s relative silence about Rosie also gave me a lot of leeway, costume-wise. To approximate the garb of a hobbit lass, I wore a traditional Norwegian folk costume, called a bunad. I grew up playing Norwegian folk music, and the bunad that was made for me twenty-five years ago still fits! Just barely.

I couldn’t make myself do the furry hobbit feet, though. I’m not that committed to recreating Rosie.