Psychological depth in Tolkien's characters

[lindil]

Tolkien really wasn't big in exploring the human psyche and its pursuits

hmmm, I thought that through the Elves and Dwarves, Ents and Hobbits, he was exploring the human psyche [or in the case of the Elves] it's idealized, or rarely realized potentials?

This to me is also another reason I see as utterly shallow, the charge of paper-thin charcterizations. The depth is nearly always there, provided you have been given a sort of Smith of Wooten Major star for your mind, to be able to perceive what the text says, as well as the impressions it creates.

What you get out of any text is of course equally dependent on the quality of your awareness as it is upon the words themselves.

As Aiwendil rightly pointed out in the dumbing down thread, Tolkien palces demands upon his readers: that they correlate information about specific characters or scenarios given often in widely different chapters texts or sources, and that be willing to read something more than once [ The Silmarillion is a perfect example of this for many people].