Well, after sitting through a hilarious lecture on the Trickster the other day, this thread was a welcome find!
Looking back over my lecture, notes I noticed that the professor mentioned the way that Goethe used the archetype of the Trickster in the Mephistopheles character, as well as the title character himself, in wiritng his famous play "Faust." The main idea was that Faust does a kind of "demolition derby" on the proper order of things in his area of influence, and is encouraged and aided in this by Mephisto. Now, both Faust and Mephisto are generally baddies (I mean, Mephisto comes straight from Hell, that is pretty clear, and Faust
is responsible for ruining Margarete's life), but they are also quite charming and provide much of the comic relief and insight. Not to mention the tiny little fact that Faust is actually redeemed in the end...So is he ultimately a bad guy... or not really? Or is he meant to be neither good nor bad, yet certainly somehow more
human than another archetype?
I'm really not sure what Tolkien's opinions on Goethe were (though something tells me they might not have been very favourable... anyone want to prove me wrong?), but it would seem that in possibly exploring the Trickster archetype in his own work, Tolkien wanted to take things a few steps further than Goethe. If we are indeed to believe that Tolkien was keenly aware of the Trickster archetype and the way it related to the universe of his own creation, then he probably wasn't particularly fond of it. It's not just that the Trickster's machinations are often uncouth, it's that the general moral ambiguity didn't mesh with any of the themes Tolkien was exploring. It is as if Tolkien wanted to discredit the Trickster myth, if he indeed chose to include elements of it in Tom Bombadil and Gollum, as if saying that you can't really be both good and bad, a line has to be drawn. And Tolkien certainly wasn't up to exploring the comedy of the Trickster stories, being more somber in his treatment of this archetype than Goethe.
In general, it seems that if a taboo is broken in Tolkien's works, the consequences are never funny or ambiguous.
Also,
littleman, you mentioned that Tolkien, in his usual style of purging the gross, chose not to pay any attention to the ravens of Norse myth. Well how about the fact that he also didn't mention the Norse goddess that fertilized the ground with her menstrual blood?
The Trickster certainly couldn't stand up to such a rigorous screening process and still remain intact.