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Child that is a wonderful point, and one that we should all keep in mind. Tolkien's characters have always seemed to me to be somewhat 'flat' -- none of them really express a kind of psychological complexity or ambiguous reality of most contemporary fiction (or of, say, Shakespearean drama). But of course Tolkien was not attempting any such form of story telling. To look for a single character/single attribution (that is. Boromir=Men) is to begin moving into allegory.
Tolkien always works in terms of pairs and relationships, so much so that his characters begin to take on the emblematic status that Child is suggesting. But where I get curious is about the mimetic intent of this 'corporate' kind of characterisation. By that wordy mouthful I mean: the sum total of the characters in the book 'add up' to a total picture of humanity. But can we look at this another way? Is it not also possible that the characters add up to a picture not of people, but of a person? Not a specific individual, but a picture of the individual mind?
But I guess it could all be part of a single individual: the members of the Fellowship, and others (Eowyn and Faramir) are little 'bits' of Tolkien?
So we have some possibilities here:
1) the characters are a corporate/group/fragmented/split representation of people; of human nature
2) they are a representation of the individual human mind/spirit
3) they are a representation of Tolkien
4) they are a representation of human society.
I rather suspect that all of these things are going on all the time. The point is that while the characters are rather flat, and the moral dilemmas are rather simple, the relations between them are infinitely complex and it is that complexity in which we find the most accurate representation of our own primary world.
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Scribbling scrabbling.
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