Character development in LOTR Novels

Cafe Society
1

In this thread (which you don’t really need to open up) I posit that a problem I have with Tolkien’s trilogy is that the main characters are unrelatable…they all seem to be perfect and lacking in any flaws.

My relevant points from that thread, which is comparing Thomas Covenant to LOTR:

Basically, I’m of the opinion that the character development what one dimensional. The characters are all perfect until the ring corrupts them. Even Gollum was basically a Hobbit, thus exemplifying goodness.

I think inner darkness, as opposed to externally enforced darkness, is decidedly lacking.

What do you guys think?

I might concede Aragorn shirking his throne to play at being a Ranger, but he is a human. But is Aragorn the character we are supposed to relate to?

I guess my real question is, does Tolkien write any humanity into the non-human races?

2

I wouldn’t say that. He did kill to get the Ring, after all. Now, you might chalk this up to the Ring’s influence, but then, too, Bilbo, faced with the opportunity, chose otherwise. And anyway hobbits collectively aren’t perfect: they can be greedy (the Sackville-Bagginses), silly (Pippin, before going off to Minas Tirith), complacent, or, to put it another way, Frodo says at one point early on that they can be “too dull and stupid for words” – just like real people, much of the time. :wink: Which doesn’t necessarily say anything about the characterization of the protagonists, as they may indeed be a cut above average. But they’ve always felt real to me.

I also wouldn’t say that all Ring-influenced flaws are strictly the result of its presence: Boromir and Denethor, for instance, are brought down by pride as well as the influence of the Ring, although Boromir is redeemed and Denethor isn’t. (Actually, I think I’m subconsciously borrowing from Tom Shippey here, who writes in Author of the Century about the nature of evil in LotR: is it something that lurks within or something externally imposed? He concludes that it’s both.)

3

Collectively…let’s hold off on collectively for a little bit. Not sure if I know how to relate to a race, as opposed to a person, quite yet.

Regarding Gollum and Bilbo…refresh my memory how the book handles that. Peter Jackson’s movie actually has a strange backstory at the beginning of FotR. The ring wanted Smeagol, and so “possessed” him for those 500 years, but then the ring is found by someone it did not intend; the unlikeliest person of all; a Hobbit.

I assume the movie is just trying to throw us off that Gollum is Hobbit-like riverfolk, but it clearly makes the distinction that the ring wanted Gollum, but did not want Bilbo. If that is also true in the book, then Gollum and Bilbo experienced different ring influences, which could account for the one murdering and the other pitying.

Yes, those flaws may exist within the human characters you mention. (Granting that for now, but I may rejoin that debate later in thread.)

But is there any evil, darkness, or corruption “within” Frodo, Samwise, Merry, Pippen, Gandalf, Legolas, or Gimli, as opposed to ring-induced not-in-control-of-my-faculties darkness? If so, what is it?

Gimli perceives the acquisition of wealth to be noble. Therefore I can’t consider avarice to be a darkness inside him. And I don’t even recall him displaying any avarice, come to think of it.

4

Although I see what you’re getting at, I don’t feel this is a good example with which to make the point.

Gollum was extremely flawed, tormented, and did terrible evil things because of the way he was corrupted by the ring. But if the ring’s corruption changed his nature and made him that way, he still was extremely flawed as a result.

If a person performs a violent act because they are addicted to heroin, and will do anything and everything they can, just to get a fix, would you say they are not flawed, just because they have been corrupted by the drugs? This is open for debate, of course, another can of worms, so to speak. I personally feel that if a person puts a knife to my throat out of desperation for a fix, they are not fundamentally completely good, no matter what they might have been, or would have done, six years ago, prior to their addiction. And the way Tolkien portrayed Gollum’s obsession with the ring was comparable, I think. He craved it above all else, it changed him in horrific ways, physically, emotionally, and spiritually, and he would do anything at all to possess it again, even turning to both spontaneous and premeditated violence.

My God. I’m seeing double, and should be asleep. (-: I have rambled…good night.

       - Freewill39.
5

I desperately need sleep as well.

I think your analogy is excellent (and unimpeachable) but for one thing: the ring exerts control over people it has not yet come into contact with. It “found” Gollum. Heroin didn’t “find” the addict.

I’ll check back on Saturday…gonna be out all day tomorrow. I am very curious what everybody thinks. All the normal people, that is, who aren’t still awake at 3:09am Christmas night. hehheh

My god, the SDMB is my ring of power/heroin addiction. :frowning:

G’nite.

6

I think everybody has the capacity to be evil, if pushed far enough. It’s just that some people can take more pushing before compromising their morality, but nearly everyone has a breaking point. One person might act in an evil fashion to feed a powerful drug addiction, while another one might tough it out cold-turkey and refuse to give in - yet that same person might be made to do something evil if encouraged by personal gain, or forced into it by coercion. Everyone has limits, everyone has a price, it’s just a balance of strengths.

In LotR, the Ring is definitely powerful, and many otherwise strong characters are too weak to face it’s strength, but the strength needed to fight it’s draw is not outside human limits. I don’t think falling prey to the Ring is a sign of evil so much as…not weakness, even, but lack of a certain kind of strength.

7

The way I understood it, the ring lay on the bottom of the river for a few hundred years before being found by Deagol. Smeagol, after deciding that it’s his birthday and he wants it, yes he does, throttles Deagol and takes it for his own. The ring may very well have influenced that decision, perhaps sensing that it would have an easier time taking over Smeagol than Deagol, but I have a hard time believing Bilbo or Frodo or anyone else in the Fellowship would up and kill someone after just five minutes exposure to the ring (it took Boromir several months to work up to violence, and even then he was just trying to rob Frodo; I don’t think he intended to kill him). I think Gollum was predisposed to be weak and power-hungry from the beginning; I also think the ring didn’t foresee that he would take it under a mountain and stay there for 500 years. At the time Bilbo found the ring, Sauron was regaining his power; I think the ring sensed that and “lost” itself, probably assuming one of the nearby orcs would pick it up.

I think I may be rambling, but I’m another one who badly needs to go to sleep.

8

The problem with the comparison to Donaldson, IMHO, is the overriding simplistic assumption that mere selfishness in a character is “deep” or “multi-dimensional.”

Yes, Tolkien has characters who start good and remain good (like Aragorn and Faramir), and characters who start evil and remain evil (like Wormtongue and Sauron.)

But he also has characters who start good and turn evil, not because of the ring, but because of lust for power (Saruman) and because of despair (Denethor) and because of the evil influence of advisors (Theoden, who then turns back.) His main characters try unsuccessfully to encourage an evil character to turn towards goodness (Frodo trying to save Gollum, Gandalf offering the defeated Saruman the choice of joining them). He has characters who are neutral/self-centered, like Treebeard and the hobbits, who make choices. He has characters faced with doubt and wavering, like Frodo.

Almost all the characters seem to be changed on account of their roles in the story, such as the dwarf and elf overcoming their racial hatreds and becoming friends. Only a few characters (mainly elves like Elrond and Galadriel) seem to remain unchanged by their experiences (well, their physical circumstances change, but you know what I mean.)

I only read one Thomas Covenant book, and I barely got through that. I found the characters to be extremely shallow under the pretense of “depth”, and all of them selfish and unlikable and self-centered.

9

Makes sense. But again, even if he was manipulated by the ring, he still not only did evil things as a result, but had a great deal of conflict when one part of his dual nature wanted to turn good while the other part of him convinced him to try and kill Frodo and take the ring. Even if the ring found him and corrupted him into something terrible, he was that terrible thing ultimately, and therefore extremely flawed.

Ok, drug use is a choice. How about an abusive childhood? That “finds” it’s victims against their wills, changes them despite themselves and what they might have thought and felt and been otherwise. Should we say that a person who hunts down women, or children, and proceeds to systematically rape and/or brutalize them are fundamentally good, because their evil acts came as a result of their hearts and souls being corrupted by a physically and emotionally abusive parent? Again, we’re getting into debatable territory. I happen to think that a serial rapist or someone who brutalizes children deserves credit for being evil in their rite, I don’t care what their daddy did to them. And if they recognize this, and try to stop, and are unable to…that’s a pretty complex character trait.

**
[/QUOTE]
I’ll check back on Saturday…gonna be out all day tomorrow. I am very curious what everybody thinks. All the normal people, that is, who aren’t still awake at 3:09am Christmas night. hehheh

My god, the SDMB is my ring of power/heroin addiction. :frowning: **
[/QUOTE]

Yes, Ellis Dee, Precious wants you to debate. Come back to Precious. Post on Precious. We love the Precious. :dubious:

            - Freewill39.
10

Well… the two series are fairly dissimilar.

The Covenant series is a modern work, heir to all the arguments about borrowing and influence of previous works.

Tolkien’s series is seminal, to some extent, influenced by earlier myth cycles, certainly, but has been called the first real modern work of fantasy (although it shows a lot of pre-Hemingway influence in its style and prose – Tolkien was British, after all, and pretty conservative).

A difference I percieve in the two series is this: Tolkien’s characters are not only characters… but symbols.

Aragorn represents true nobility, in all ways and means; the Perfect Hero who never wavers… but even he should not carry the Ring, because of its corrupting power.

Boromir is a classic case of the Flawed Hero, the guy who thought he was up to the job (and so did everyone else), and it turns out he had a fatal flaw. Ghod, every Lit teacher I ever had beat this one to death.

Hobbits in general represent pastoral innocence, and the moral core and basic decency that’s supposed to result from this sort of upbringing. In some ways, Sam is the archtypical hobbit: not too swift, but certainly a strong, moral chap, not presumptuous or presupposing… but ultimately, the backbone of the entire quest to destroy the Ring. His only weakness is in his loyalty to his friends.

See what I mean? It could be said that investing symbolic value in the characters makes 'em “two-dimensional,” but I am inclined to disagree. I believe this is what Tolkien was trying to DO the whole time – create an epic in the old epic style, with characters who represent essential PARTS of that old style. The Covenant series, on the other hand, does not do this, at least not as obviously. The characters are much more modern (at least in part because some of them come from our world), and, more importantly, their styling is more modern … even the denizens of The Land.

Tolkien was working within a framework provided by Them What Came Before. Donaldson, on the other hand, was not.

The bottom line: Tolkien was looking backwards, trying to create an old-style epic for the modern day. Covenant, on the other hand, was trying to create a new fantasy novel, using concepts from the whole fantasy genre, but without the same old tired rehashes of Tolkien, Howard, and so forth. Hell, Donaldson has gone so far as to SAY that one of the reasons he wrote the Covenant series is because he was sick to death of Tolkien pastiches…

11

With all due respect to the folks who see the Tolkien story as nothing but a moral fable in which the good guys are victorious over the bad guys, I see a great deal of character development going on.

All four hobbits are changed by their journey. Merry and Pippin are portrayed as happy-go-lucky late adolescents who come of age and come to recognize the seriousness of problems confronting them and their people in the course of their encounters with Rohan and Gondor. Frodo is portrayed in a very exalted light – the hero figure with the strength of character (though small potatoes in the epic war scene) to get the tough job done – but the pull of the Ring’s temptation to power strains him to the breaking point. Sam, the quintessential hobbit, is raised from a parochial “redneck” stereotype into someone who must make moral choices on which great developments literally depend, and learns a great deal about what comprises his own character in consequence. Smeagol (who BTW is canonically a hobbit for all practical purposes, being a Stoor, one of the three tribes that founded the Shire, from a group that remained living along the Anduin instead of migrating with the rest to Eriador to found the Shire) is probably the ultimate in obsessive-compulsive behavior with a corresponding personality breakdown, but even he is brought near to “repentance” (Tolkien’s word) by Frodo’s kindly treatment of him.

Aragorn’s motivations are not well explored in the books, and it’s a tribute to Peter Jackson that the fear of taking a long-shot risk to claim his inheritance is developed in the movies. Denethor in the books (as opposed to the repulsive job of characterization in the ROTK movie) is a strong character whose sense of high responsibility in a circumstance he can only see as a probably inevitable defeat leads to his despair. The book Theoden (not possessed as in the movie but rather the victim of Grima’s insidious manipulations) is a fascinating case of personality development – the sagas with which Tolkien was familiar would depict him as the elderly hero-king; Tolkien shows him first rejecting and than accepting this role. And the character of Eowyn is like having a women’s lib. novelist of 25 years ago rewrite an old Anglo-Saxon legend – it may be old hat today but was groundbreaking in 1954!

12

Here’s a few off the top of my head:

-Feanor
-Eol, the Dark Elf
-Amroth, the tragic former Lord of Lorien
-Thorin (see The Quest for Erebor - UT)
-Mim, the last of the Petty Dwarves

13

I’d add Maedhros & Maglor to that list of Thorongil’s.

14

<< I guess my real question is, does Tolkien write any humanity into the non-human races? >>

I don’t understand this question. Tolkien’s non-human races are all very much human – he’s not C.J. Cherryh, creating wholly non-human species. Tolkien’s races are all imbued with human characteristics, and (aside from the immortality and a few specialized skills) could as easily have been human races.

Elves are Zen, if you will, focused on the past and on harmony with nature. Dwarves are focused on riches and material things. Orcs are focused on greed and fighting and jealousy. In the books, the orcs have very “human” conversations (about the bureaucracy, for instance.) One of the great joys of Tolkien is that he uses stereotypes of races to allows movement outside the stereotypes – thus, Legolas learns that dwarves are not just the stereotypes that he has been taught.

All of Tolkien’s characters are VERY human.

15

In general, the non-human characters represent portions of human types: Hobbits are the plain, simple folk who like food, drink and good tilled earth. Dwarves are techno-geeks, who like hardware and money. Elves are spiritual types who respect intellect and goodness. Ents are isolationists who care about their own little part of the world have a hard time relating to others. (Very broad generalizations here.)

Each of these can go wrong. Dwarves can care TOO much about gold. Hobbits can get TOO fat and complacent.

The Fellowship, after all, are the heros of the story–they’re supposed to be way above average. One of the points that Tolkien is making is that being near perfect is not enough for salvation–anyone can be overcome by external or internal evil. Help is required (whoever meant Bilbo to find the ring) o triumph over ultimate evil. However, run-of-the-mill evil can be overcome by personal effort (Scouring of the Shire).

Leaving the question of the humanity of Gandalf aside, he has a choice to take the ring–Frodo will give it to him!–and is tempted, but ultimately decides not to. His study/knowledge convinces him that it would be a mistake and he listens to that part of himself. He has another part that wants the power of the ring, but he manages to subdue that part.

Frodo is just a generally nice guy who is stuck in a bad situation. In my opinion he is the one most corrupted by the ring.

Gollum chose to commit murder to get the ring–he could have stolen it, or convinced Deagol to give it to him, or let D keep it. He chose none of those. The ring gives power according to the wieder (can’t find the exact quote right now)–for Gollum, that means sneaking and thieving. He was fond of gossip and taking things before he met the ring (another quote I can’t find), and it magnified his faults, turing Smeagol into Gollum.

Gimli and Legolas are racists who learn that their prejudices are unfounded.

I’d say more but I gotta go ta work.

16

Just read NoCoolUserName’s post & must compliment - I thought you summed up a lot of good points.

While I agree that character development is not a strong point of LOTR it is not absent and the characters are not perfect. In addition to other imperfect characters mentioned already, I would add Grima, the Sackville-Bagginses, and Eowyn - who defies Theoden, and who almost commits the sin of despair.

I haven’t read the other series mentioned in this thread - tho I fell in love with the LOTR books, I didn’t fall in love with fantasy and have read very little over the years. (fantasy, that is; have read lots of other fiction).

17

Whoo-hoo! Snoopy dance, snoopy dance. Thanks for the compliment!

There are members of the non-human races who are much farther from perfect than the members of the Fellowship. The Dwarves in The Hobbit are much more typical Dwarves: they mean well, but when it comes down to the bottom line, they’re willing to risk war and/or starvation to keep their treasure. And they won’t listen to reason, either.

18

The book Strider/Aragorn is at least a little more complex than people tend to give him credit for, although he’s not exactly “shirking” his duty by being a ranger. In Fellowship, he’s occasionally unsure of himself (“Will all my choices go astray?”, or something like that), seems to have a need for approval from strangers (not telling the Hobbits he’s a friend of Gandalf’s because he wants them to accept him for himself) and defers to others (e.g., the trek through Moria). In ROTK, he’s the model of decisiveness and self-reliance, and on at least one occasion asserts his authority by going directly against Gandalf’s recommendation in a big way (the palantir).

Frodo seems to dawdle in the Shire longer than is necessary after learning Sauron is seeking the Ring, so you could accuse him of being a procrastinator. I think he stole mushrooms as a young hobbitling.

19

Frodo is a hobbit. They never take decisive, unilateral action. His uncle had to be pushed out the door by a wizard before he would leave home. If Gandalf had not come back and told him to leave “soon,” he would have answered the door when the Black Rider came calling.

As to mushrooms…

20

Crazy week.

Excellent points, NoCoolUserName.

I guess I was blindly flailing in the dark to come up with the symbols concept. Tolkien’s characters seem to be archetypal symbols, whereas Donaldson’s characters seem to be more human.

It is more difficult to relate to an archetypal symbol. At least, that is my position.

The question of depth is wholly different. I should not have tossed that term around.