Ok, I take
Bb's point re the Woses - yet the Woses are never really seen as 'foes' by the Rohirrim. Up till the War of the Ring they are seen as little better than animals to be hunted, & after they offer their service they become allies. At no point are they 'noble foes' (one would have to class them as 'noble savages').
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Originally Posted by Nogrod
Somehow it looks like numbness in front of violence, a denial for any dignity given to those on the "other side". Getting numb is possibly the only way to survive terrible enough experiences. But such a romantic and not giving any gallant enemies for our heroes to beat? It would have been the tradition, it would have made the heroes more valiant and their cause & morals somehow more intricate and still he did not go for it.
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This is the point I've been struggling to get across. Of course the question is begged as to whether the enemies (or some of them at least)
were noble warrors, deserving of respect, but this was denied by the victors. Of course, that would be too difficult to accept, as it would basically make the heroes liars. So we are left with the simpler explanation - those on the other side are all cowards, cruel, vicious & deserving only of death. And yet
Aragorn pardons his (human) foes & accepts (or conscripts) them into the Commonwealth of Gondor. Why does he do this? Is it simply because they are Humans, & he feels (in Kipling's phrase) the 'White Man's Burden' & that it is his obligation to 'civilise' the 'savages' - or could it be that they are deemed worthy in some way to be included - they actually did display courage, albeit in a wrong cause, & Aragorn deemed them worthy of respect for their actions not simply for their genetics?
Yet if so, why is this not mentioned anywhere in the text? So Tolkien, writing an 'Epic Romance' excludes one of the central themes in Romance literature. One could cite Palomedes, the Saracen Knight in Malory - he is Tristan's rival for Iseult, & comes up against most of the Round Table Knights, yet he is a 'noble enemy'.
Nogrod makes a very interesting point - a noble foe ennobles a hero (is ennobles a word? Perhaps 'embiggens' ....
).
It is interesting to ponder what, if anything, is lost by this absence. Would Aragorn be a greater hero (or at the least a greater
Man) if he had fought against a foe as honourable as he himself?
And yet, that would have been impossible given the kind of tale Tolkien was telling - but that brings up another question - what kind of tale
was he telling? He denies it is an allegory, & 'prefers history, real or feigned', yet can we think of any historical conflict where one side was made up entirely of vicious cowards with no moral value system - doesn't this actually conflict with what we know of human nature? One cannot hold up the Nazis as heroes, yet there were individual German soldiers who performed acts of bravery, & commanders like Rommel were highly respected for their tactical skill & personal courage. In fact, we often see German soldiers at British commemorations of WWII. The leaders of Nazi Germany are obviously condemned, yet the ordinary troops are accepted as 'fellow braves'.
Now, none of this requires the heroes to
like their enemy, it is about respect for the foe, because in a sense warriors share experiences that non combatants cannot know anything of - they have both suffered hardship & loss of comrades & 'speak a common language'. Yet Tolkien, the veteran, who must have known this very 'respect' for the foe, omits it entirely from his work. In various of the Letters he states that there are good & bad men on both sides in war - yet not in any of the wars he depicts.
I wonder if he felt restricted by the type of story he was telling - a noble enemy (even one or two) would have reflected a faint light of 'nobility' on the enemy's cause - & he couldn't risk such a thing, so the nature of the enemy is dictated by the nature of the tale, but one has to ask whether the tale itself & the heroes it tells of are in some way 'diminished'?