Representing Men?

[Bêthberry]

Oh, I think it was Eowyn who stood for men. Ah, but wait; she wasn't in the Fellowship. Pity.

[Fordim Hedgethistle]

Child that is a wonderful point, and one that we should all keep in mind. Tolkien's characters have always seemed to me to be somewhat 'flat' -- none of them really express a kind of psychological complexity or ambiguous reality of most contemporary fiction (or of, say, Shakespearean drama). But of course Tolkien was not attempting any such form of story telling. To look for a single character/single attribution (that is. Boromir=Men) is to begin moving into allegory.

Tolkien always works in terms of pairs and relationships, so much so that his characters begin to take on the emblematic status that Child is suggesting. But where I get curious is about the mimetic intent of this 'corporate' kind of characterisation. By that wordy mouthful I mean: the sum total of the characters in the book 'add up' to a total picture of humanity. But can we look at this another way? Is it not also possible that the characters add up to a picture not of people, but of a person? Not a specific individual, but a picture of the individual mind?

But I guess it could all be part of a single individual: the members of the Fellowship, and others (Eowyn and Faramir) are little 'bits' of Tolkien?

So we have some possibilities here:

1) the characters are a corporate/group/fragmented/split representation of people; of human nature

2) they are a representation of the individual human mind/spirit

3) they are a representation of Tolkien

4) they are a representation of human society.

I rather suspect that all of these things are going on all the time. The point is that while the characters are rather flat, and the moral dilemmas are rather simple, the relations between them are infinitely complex and it is that complexity in which we find the most accurate representation of our own primary world.

[davem]

Originally Posted by Fordim

Tolkien's characters have always seemed to me to be somewhat 'flat' -- none of them really express a kind of psychological complexity or ambiguous reality of most contemporary fiction (or of, say, Shakespearean drama).

I don't want to sidetrack this thread, but I've recently been searching for an old post of Squatter's on this very question of pyschological depth, because he makes a valuable point about Gimli & Legolas' conversation on leaving Lorien, which I wanted to refer to in the Chapter-by-Chapter thread. Its so enlightening that some of you might want to read it now:
http://forum.barrowdowns.com/showpos...&postcount=127

[The Saucepan Man]

That's one of the few threads that I started that ever went anywhere, so I feel duty-bound to give the full link (it being relevant to the question of whether Tolkien's characters are flat 'n all):

Psychological depth in Tolkien's characters

[Nimrodel_9]

I was reading in The Fellowship of the Ring today, and I came upon this:

For men you shall have Aragorn son of Arathorn, for the Ring of Isildur concerns him closely.

..............

"I would have begged for you to come," said Frodo, "only I thought you were going to Minas Tirith with Boromir." "I am," said Aragorn, "And the Sword-that-was-Broken will be re-forged ere I set out to war. But your road and my road lie together for many hundreds of miles. Therefore Boromir will also be in the Company. He is a valiant man.

So, if you decipher from that...

I liked my other theory better.