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Originally Posted by davem
Good point - Tolkien assumes such a 'natural morality' in the reader but not in all the inhabitants of his world - which seems to imply that his secondary world does not operate by the same 'rules' as the primary.
Yet possibly this comes back to the different creation myths - the primary world was created 'good' & fell post creation, while the secondary world was created with Melkor's 'flaws' inherent in it.
So the reader is reading about an 'alien' world in which the 'natural morality' which holds in our world does not hold in that world. The inhabitants of M-e, it seems, do not have such a 'natural morality' - which seems to mean that when they make choices in conformity with our 'natural morality' they are making an unnatural choice. So one could argue that such choices are more difficult for them than they would be for us......
Unless....but... what I mean to say is.....er....
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Well, judging just from the interview you linked to, I can't see where Tolkien assigns this natural morality to readers but not to his secondary world. Of course, one can never completely rely upon newspaper articles, which are so severely pruned by space limitations and subject to their journalists' decisions of what to highlight and whatnot, but that passage leads one to assume that Tolkien assigns natural morality to his sub-created world.
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Did this alternative creation worry Tolkien, a lifetime Roman Catholic? It did not seem to. I had remarked to him once that, despite the absence of organised religion in his mythical world - no priests, no temples - his peoples still behaved well. Yes, of course, he said, there was "what theologians call natural morality, natural duties and courtesies - when a man refuses to strike an enemy when he's down, that sort of thing".
He regarded artistic creativity, including his own, as a gift from God: we are created in the image of our Creator, and our own sub-creations, as he called them, were a pale reflection of that original.
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Bolding mine.
Actually, I rather like the idea that Tolkien chose to make goodness dramatically exciting, althought I'm not sure he ever stated this explicitly. He chose to set himself an artistic challenge and not make evil aesthetically attractive--quite a turnaround from most literature! He focussed upon the actions and choices and emotions of his heroes and doesn't in much way make Saruman or Gollem in any way someone we would want to emulate or be. Who of us would like to be in Gollem's shoes--or rather, walk with his bruised and torn and cut bare feet? Not many I wager. (I could of course be wrong about this.)
Did Tolkien learn a lesson from Milton in particular?