[Legate of Amon Lanc]

Originally Posted by davem

My feeling is that while the Ring may contain some of Sauron's Will, it doesn't contain so much of his 'taste' that it will make a possessor of it ever want to live in a big tower in a blasted landscape - unless that desire was there in the first place. I think a 'megaLorien' is at the same 'extreme' of evil as Mordor - both are 'effects' of the utilisation of absolute power.

Surely. But what I want to say is that when we speak especially of the Ring in particular, and not any other form of corruption by power, the Ring's effects are two: first, boosting the original lust for power, second, leaking Sauron's thoughts through. As I said, it would have to take millenia for Galadriel to start breeding Orcs, but ultimately, I believe it would come. That would happen at the moment, when the Ring would have destroyed the wielder's prior identity. Technically, the person would become a Nazgul himself.
(Please note - and I hope it was clear even from what I posted earlier, just want to make it sure - that I do not speak of profiling the evil in general, I speak only of the one particular case of the Ring, which had a little bit of Sauron's personality in it.)

Originally Posted by William Cloud Hickli

For an Augustinian Catholic beauty on Earth is a distant echo of Divine perfection, and so I think for Tolkien the rejection of Eru's purpose (embodied in the moral law) means abandoning that echo- this can be seen even in the case of Aule and the Dwarves, who are not evil, but are indeed unlovely.

Originally Posted by davem

So Tolkien lectures us. And yet, doesn't he fall into the same trap himself - allying ugliness almost solely with evil & beauty with goodness. Yes, there are examples of evil having a beautiful face (Annatar), & good having an ugly one (the Woses), yet in reality these are exceptions that prove the rule. In M-e not only do "evil and ugliness seem indissolubly allied" they are so. If we do find it "difficult to conceive of evil and beauty together" Tolkien himself could be said to have exacerbated that problem.

Or perhaps its simply because LotR, indeed the Legendarium as a whoie, is not actually a 'Fairy Story' at all?

The question is, what did Tolkien himself think - what did leak into his image of Middle-Earth, was it more like, as William said, the Augustinian Catholic point of view, or did he see it as a "Fairy story"? I believe he was not himself sure at certain points, or subconsciously, some things just pushed him to portray the evil as ugly (exactly as in the quote davem provided - a brilliant example!). Yet, I think at certain moments, like that in the "Mirror of Galadriel", he managed to get past this and show that even beautiful can be "evil".