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Old 09-23-2004, 02:47 PM   #21
Aiwendil
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Join Date: Mar 2001
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Davem wrote:
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Perhaps its not so much 'male' vs 'female', as it is 'eros' vs 'logos'.
This is a good way of putting it. I think that perhaps this distinction is a little like that between yin and yang - it is a profound distinction, but a vague one. Logos, artifice, male vs. eros, nature, female.

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Just occurs, maybe Shelob could be seen as Sauron's repressed anima, his eros side, eating, consuming, drawing all things into itself.
An excellent point. I suppose Ungoliant and Melkor can be contrasted in the same way. And again the feminine/eros side is the natural (in this case bestial) one; the masculine/logos side is the one interested in artifice. There seem to be countless such pairs when one starts thinking about it. It occurs to me that we may even see something of the distinction in Bilbo vs. Frodo. Bilbo goes looking for adventure (something typically considered masculine) and demonstrates artifice in creating his own poetry; Frodo much more passively accepts the role that is assigned to him and rarely writes his own stuff.

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Ulmo is interesting, as he is always alone, which implies his logs & eros 'sides' were perfectly balanced.
I see the appeal of looking at it that way. But I'm much more inclined to view Ulmo as being on the eros/nature side. He is frequently contrasted with Aule, for one thing. Also his water-affinity associates him with the Teleri as opposed to the Noldor, and it is his counsel that the Quendi be left in Middle-earth rather than summoned to Valinor - i.e. left to their nature rather than civilized.

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Generally speaking logos dominates over eros in males & eros over logos in females, but that is certainly to over generalise.
I think that's an unfair over-generalization in the real world, but in Middle-earth it certainly has some truth.

A thought that I forgot to come to in my previous post: it seems that often when we are presented with a natural extreme and an artificial extreme we are also given a sort of happy medium. For example, Saruman is artificial, Radagast is natural, and Gandalf is the ideal balance. Others that occur to me:

Aule (artifice), Ulmo (nature), Manwe (balance)

Feanor (artifice), Finarfin (nature), Fingolfin (balance) (in this case we also have Fingon and Finrod, just a shade to the artificial and natural sides, respectively)

Noldor (artifice), Teleri (nature), Vanyar (balance)

This leads to the question of whether one can be too natural, too far to the eros side. Certainly it intuitively seems that such must be possible, but it is always the artificers that go bad. To put in another way: the danger of logos is that the desire for knowledge becomes the desire for control; what is the danger of eros?
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