Tolkien and the Monsters

[davem]

But Fordim its difficult to think about the nature of evil as personified in the monsters in the book without asking what form the evil they personify takes. I'd say Tolkien is exploring different kinds of evil. Evil doesn't have a specific form, as Evil is not a 'force' coequal with good, it is, as others have pointed out, a corruption of good, & corruption takes different forms. There is not a single source of pure EVIL in Midddle Earth, so we can't analyse it as if there is - all the monsters manifesting some aspect of that source. The Barrow Wight, as I said, is for me a manifestation of a desire towards nothingness.

Shippey quotes from Lewis's Screwtape Letters:

Screwtape makes the transition neatly at the end of Letter 12 when he remarks that Christians describe God as the One 'without whom Nothing is strong'. They speak truer than they know, he declares:

Nothing is very strong: strong enough to steal away a man's best years not in sweet sins but in a dreary flickering of the mind over it knows not what & knows not why, in the gratification of curiosities so feeble that the man is only half aware of them ... or in the long, dim labyrinth of reveries that have not even lust or ambition to give them a relish.

I can see the long slow horror of the Barrow Wight's existence, & the nature of its evil spelled out right there. It is similar to the evil manifested by Shelob. The Wraiths manifest a different kind of perversion of good - desire to control the world. They are like beaurocrats, lost in simply 'doing their jobs' - I always imagnine them speaking in a flat monotone, just going through the motions:

'Ah, you are Eowyn, you say. I'll just make a note of that if I may. Right, I must inform you that if you attempt to hinder me I will have to have you removed from here & placed in the Houses of Lamentation where officials will devour your flesh & your mind be left naked to the Lidless Eye. Is that clear to you, or would you like someone to explain it to you? Now please sign here, in triplicate. You may keep a copy of the form.'

In other words, I see an absence of 'malice', of a relishing in cruelty. Its about control & order. And this is what drew them to take the rings in the first place. The most chilling thing (almost enough to inspire pity - almost) for the Lord of the Nazgul, are his words to Gandalf:

'Do you not know death when you see it?'

He's talking about himself! That's all he is. Death. He was once a King, a ruler, making laws, organising his realm, ruling others - perhaps in the beginning for their good. Now he's just this thing, this 'robot' that does as its commanded. He cannot see the world, living things - they just 'cast shadows in his mind'. What can he see, in his world? Others like him - pale, ugly, undead things. Living things can't look on his face, see him as a fellow creature, empathise with him, care about him. And the greatest tragedy is that he can no longer care that they can't. He is simply death, & all he can do is make other things dead - either literally dead or so enslaved & controlled, so without a will of their own that they will be as good as dead.

But that's the end of the road he chose to take. As the end of the road Morgoth chose to take was to become so absorbed in what he desired - Arda - that there was almost nothing of him left when the forces of the Valar came to take him. He became what he desired, & lost himself. Ungoliant, in the end became hunger, as did Shelob, & in the end devoured herself.

So, at the end of the road of the choice evil makes for itself is its own desire, waiting for it. What began as the individual's greatest desire becomes in the end its greatest horror, it becomes what it most desired to be, obtains what it most desired to have, & realises, too late, that it has made the most terrible mistake. But by then perhaps it doesn't really care, & the pain isn't really all that bad - who knows? Both Saruman & Sauron do make a half hearted attempt at repentance, but they're so far gone by then they probably don't much care either way.

Orcs, in the end, are most like us. They drift along, obeying orders, & enjoying the suffering they cause, because they can justify it by blaming the victims. We're all capable of orcish behaviour - & how many of us truly repent of it, even when we have the chance?

As Tadeusz Andrej Olszanski puts it in 'Evil & the Evil one in Tolkien's Theology' (essay in the Tolkien Centenary conference collection):

Evil results from resisting the Creator, from a desire for independence from Him, & especially from laying down one's own laws for ruling the world, & so from conceit. Evil is always the result of a choice or a giving in to temptation, which is also a choice'