Tolkien and the Monsters

[davem]

Originally Posted by Evisse

Please let me know if I don't understand correctly so far.

Yes, & I think you sum it up better than me!

Question is whether the 'fairy tale' monsters are truly 'at home' in Middle earth. They certainly are in the Hobbit. The goblins & wargs are inhabitants of the world of fairy story, perectly at home there, because Bilbo has wandered into their world. They are 'monsters' pure & simple - as is Gollum - in the first edition particularly. Bilbo is a typical Edwardian gentleman who strays into Faerie, & meets people & creatures, good & bad, but we aren't really given an account of why they're good or bad. Its simply assumed - goblins & trolls are bad, because they are bad in all the fairy stories. Dwarves are basically good, but greedy. Elves are good but potentially dangerous, etc.

Then, as we begin the 'sequel' things start to change, because Tolkien decides to tie LotR into the Sil, eventually to make it the culmination of the Legendarium. At that point it all changes & explanations are required for good & evil. Tom Bombadil is basically a (brilliantly realised) fairy story character.* If he appeared in a stand alone fairy tale (as he does in the two Bombadil poems) we would simply accept him, & not require an explanation, because characters like that inhabit Faerie - if Smith had found him in faerie, dancing with the Fairy Queen, we'd have taken him as one of the inhabitants of that land. Put him into Middle Earth, make him a character in LotR, & we suddenly need to account for him, explain what he is. He must be a) a Maiar, b) one of the Valar, c) Illuvatar Himself, d) something else, a 'unique' one-off (but even then we try & analyse his nature & powers, & why he's not affected by the Ring.

In short, while any character in Faerie is accepted for the most part at face value, characters in Middle earth, existing in a 'moral' universe, must be explained, or we can't accept them. Tom doesn't fit into Middle earth precisely enough (even though many of us feel that he absolutely belongs there, because we can't fit him into the 'good' vs 'bad' scenario. So, for some people he's an insurmountable problem, & they won't even read that section of the book, jumping from leaving Crickhollow straight to Bree. The orcs of the Hobbit are the same kind of thing, & Tolkien gives us different orcs in LotR, more intelligent, more psychopathic, but he can't explain them, make them fit in to a proto-Christian Middle earth, any more than he can explain Tom - ironically, because he created Tom, & you'd expect him to be able to give an account of him that made him fit. With the orcs, its the other way around - he can't properly account for them, because he didn't invent them, he imported them. They're evil, because they're evil, because they're evil,.... But 'nothing was evil in the beginning'.

Faerie is a moral universe, only in the sense that some of its inhabitants are good & some evil. Its not a moral universe in the sense that good & evil are moral choices made by its inhabitants - the moral choices in Faerie are the choices made by those humans who stray in there. The orcs in Middle earth simply can't be 'explained' to fit into Middle earth, any more than Tom can, because they're inhabitants of an 'older', other, world.

Its like the Arthurian legends - wizards, fays, ogres, have all strayed into the courtly world of medieval Europe, but by the end, with Arthur's death, the magic. good & evil, goes away - same with Middle earth after the destruction of the Ring. Its the end of magic. The faerie world, into which the heroes have strayed, is eitehr ending, or 'splitting off' & going its own way. As the Fellowship leave Lorien they are unsure whether they are moving away from it, or whether the forest is drifting away from them, & they are standing still. At the end of the LotR, Sam watches the Grey Ship move away down the long grey firth, but perhaps the Elven ship, the elven world is staying there, & the Middle earth of the fourth age is drifting away from it.

If there is

a flaw, a crack in this otherwise brilliantly crafted structure that is Tolkien's world.

its perhaps Tolkien's need to make Middle earth a moral universe, with evil 'accounted' for by its moral choices. In a fairy story the moral choices would have been the sole prerogative of those who stray into that world: men & hobbits.

* same applies to Beorn.