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Originally Posted by Formendacil
In a world that is more and more becoming elastic in its moral standards, blurring the lines of good and evil, authors are following in the tradition of assigning morals like ours to non-humans, contrary to a more moral age, when authors assigned no morals like ours to non-human creatures...
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Well, Tolkien certainly does. Clarke doesn't - in a footnote she mentions that faeries are effectively 'insane' - at least in comparison to humans. She is speaking as narrator though. Certainly her Fairies lack anything approaching a human standard of morality. Yet they seem to have a sense of right & wrong - its just not ours. Tolkien attributes the same moral value system to Elves, Dwarves & humans - & even his Orcs seem to have a 'moral' code. Gorbag or Shagrat (don't have the books with me) refers to the leaving of Frodo as a 'regular Elvish trick', & Shagrat declares Gorbag a 'filthy rebel'.
Tolkien's assigning of a common moral value system seems to deny any real moral difference between races. The only real difference between Elves & mortals seems to be that Elves are bound within the circles of the world while mortals are not. Effectively this reduces the difference between them to mortality.
In the Irish myths Fairies have a different origin to men. In the (Christianised) tradition the Fairies were originally the neutral Angels - they took no part in Lucifer's rebellion, but were caught up in the expulsion from Paradise & fell to earth - though not being evil they didn't end up in Hell & were fated to wander the earth. This would make them equivalent to Tolkien's Ainur - except there were no neutral Ainur: they either sided with Melkor or remained loyal to Eru.
It would seem that Tolkien's focus on Death as his chief area of exploration (he declared that LotR is 'about death, the inevitability of death) perhaps overrode other questions. Yet it lead him to ignore other issues. Its outside the tradition, yet we seem to accept it as being traditional - is this purely because so few of his readers have no knowledge of the traditions or is there more to it? Do we feel that Tolkien tapped into something that was originally there but was subsequently lost - as
Drigel suggested, or is it that Tolkien's Elves are easier to relate to & identify with?