Radagast in The Hobbit Film (SPOILERS)

[Morthoron]

Originally Posted by Bêthberry

And there is, as I said, certainly St. Francis' work. Yet saying something is not the same as doing something. After all, there are prohibitions against murder in the Ten Commandments but that didn't stop pograms against Jews in the Middle Ages or witch hunts and burnings. In general, the attitude towards the lesser status of animals is common in Western culture.

I agree with you that Tolkien's use of animals appears related to his own personal preferences--although the eagles clearly have a genesis in biblical references--but really my question is more to the point of why Radagast's love of animals is so closely tied with his failings.

Is he a buffoon because he loves animals or are his animalistic habits a sign of his madness? And what are we to think of Peter Jackson, who apparently wishes to modernise the female presence in Middle-earth as he wanted to modernise Aragorn's style of heroism or manhood, but who seems quite happy to use animals as the butt of jokes and crudity? Or does his politically correct consciousness not extend to animals?

Beth, in regards to animals Tolkien relied heavily on folkloric motifs throughout his corpus. This is readily apparent even in The Hobbit: Bear=Beorn relative to Anglo-Saxon and even earlier Norse motifs, the references to the Old English and Yorksire derivations of spider (ie., 'attercop', 'lob', 'cob'), Warg (from the Norse/Icelandic 'vargr', related to the deity Fenris/Fenrir, and also the A/S Beowulf 'grund-wyrgen' or 'warg of the deep'), the white stag/hart is drawn from Celtic/Brythonic lore and either presages the faery realm or the breaking of 'tynged' ('taboo', or in Irish 'geasa'), etc.

Elsewhere, horses are noble and it is also noble to ride them (the Rohirrim were utterly appalled that someone would even imply they would sell horses to Sauron); crows are harbingers of death (hence carrion-crows hanging around the gibbet or battlefield), thus the pejorative "stormcrow" levelled at Gandalf; and cats have always been associated as demonic familiars for witches; even the cock crowing prior to the charge of the Rohirrim in Gondor is a biblical motif.