'Spun Candy' anyone?

[Lalwendë]

Originally Posted by Mister Underhill

I daresay that this is too simplistic. A key theme of Tolkien's is of a desire to do good which ends in evil, great or small. You have the characters who are obviously deluding themselves, like Saruman, but then you also have Sam snapping at Gollum at a critical moment -- to help Frodo, but perhaps with the ultimate effect of tilting Gollum away from redemption forever. Good and evil are not so clear in Tolkien as Pullman would like to think they are.

I agree. At one level, our omnipotent level as the Reader, we can see what is good and evil in Middle-earth. We can see the goal, and we can see what types of behaviour will make the goal unreachable, more or less. We also have the Silmarillion and knowledge of Eru and Light and the ordered cosmos.

However, bringng this down to the level of say a Dunlending living in Middle-earth, do they have that knowledge? And even if they did, we have to look at their circumstances. Tolkien does not have a writerly wrath or rain of fire and brimstone on those who do not follow the 'correct' path as we see it. They do more or less get some kind of comeuppance at the end (that's a part of high fantasy, that the 'bad guy' gets a thrashing ), but Tolkien does this with a sense of sadness - e.g. the ends of Denethor, Gollum, Grima, even Saruman are all quite touching. He even has the Rohirrim treat those who died in the assault on Helm's Deep with the greatest respect.

Even the 'good guys' can go very, very wrong, such as Boromir, Aragorn's displays of arrogance, Sam's distrust of Gollum, Frodo's failure to resist the Ring, Galadriel's lust for power, Gandalf's temper etc. Now there's an interesting thing. Tolkien has lots of flawed characters, just like real world people! Some go the right way, some not. The characters do struggle over what is right and wrong. Frodo does, Sam does, Aragorn spends most of his time going down the Anduin worrying about what's the right thing to do.

I think Pullman is someone else who has let autobiographical details about Tolkien overshadow the actual text. He has seen the big red words Catholic! Christian! and has decided that of course, this must be a proselytising work. Hmm, interesting when many (most?) readers are not devout.

I can't remember anything in The Lord of the Rings, in all that vast epic of heroic battles and ancient magic, that titanic struggle between good and evil, that even begins to approach the ethical power and the sheer moral shock of the scene in Jane Austen's Emma when Mr Knightley reproaches the heroine for her thoughtless treatment of poor Miss Bates. Emma's mortification is one of those eye-opening moments after which nothing is the same. Emma will grow up now, and if we pay attention to what's happening in the scene, so will we. That's what realistic fiction can do, and what fantasy of the Tolkien sort doesn't. ...

This is not correct as any of us will know! How many truly shocking moments are there in the book?! Gollum's fall, Frodo's failure, Boromir's betrayal, Gandalf's fall (and return), and Eowyn's unrequited love? That last one, of all of them, really is shocking, and transcends traditional fantasy 'shock tactics', harking back to older myths, and touching on what ordinary people might experience.

I mean though, what's all this about 'growing up'? Is this the only issue that concerns any of us?!