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Originally Posted by LMP
How about starting a new thread in Books on this so that anybody who's interested in this particular aspect can find it without having to dig 6 pages into a movie thread on Split Personality?
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And this is the spark - a post of mine in the Split Personality thread:
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Originally Posted by littlemanpoet
What he evoked is what evil is in its realistic complexity.
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Just occurs to me, on the subject of evil - is evil depicted differently in CoH to the way its depicted in LotR - if we take them as stand alone works? In short, the main force/source of evil in LotR is defeated & the tale ends in hope, while in CoH evil has total victory.
I'm thinking here of the CoH review in the Church Times http://www.churchtimes.co.uk/content.asp?id=42450
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Here the fallen archangel and the dragon organise the doom that the defiant Húrin must watch helplessly, which culminates in his son and daughter unknowingly marrying one another. Is Túrin right to call himself “master of doom”? He continues defiant, and kills the dragon; but when he and his sister separately learn the truth, they both kill themselves. Tolkien offers no judgement on this; but in The Lord of the Rings Túrin is known as one of the great heroes, “the mighty Elf-friends of old”.
The Lord of the Rings is silent about his story, but its own centre might be called equally dark. Providence arranges for Frodo to bear a temptation so strong that in the end he must give way. But he endures for long enough to ensure that, when he does give in, the world can still be saved (by his dark other self destroying itself — he himself is too much damaged to go on living in the world).
It would be more reassuring to believe that God never allows us to face a temptation that we are unable to endure; but Tolkien’s view looks uncomfortably realistic.
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Of course, this perhaps takes the thread off topic, but if we only had CoH from Tolkien would we take a different message from Tolkien about the nature of evil? The most interesting thing to me about CoH is that there is no Ring to either claim or reject.
Or what about this one http://www.sfreviews.net/tolkien_children_of_hurin.html
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The Children of Húrin draws an impressive balance between the modern and the classical. Darker and less redemptive by light-years than The Lord of the Rings, its story is unutterably sad, but viscerally powerful in the way literature's greatest tragedies have been. And Alan Lee's peerless art — the color plate of Glaurung between pages 224-25 is beyond Hugo-worthy — enhances the story's sense of consequence. Perhaps a book better read by those already a little deeper into Tolkien than casual fans who picked up the trilogy in the wake of the movies, The Children of Húrin is an impassioned exercise in mythmaking, a story that cuts to the darkness within its hero, to find a frightened child.
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Is Turin 'evil' or is he really a 'frightened child' trying to do his best & failing because of some inner fault - or is it simply a 'fault' - is it some inner 'darkness'/evil'? How different is Boromir to Turin - is it the Ring which corrupts him, or is the Ring equivalent to Morgoth's curse?
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So, is evil portrayed differently in the two books? Can we compare the corrupting influence of the Ring & the destructive influence of Morgoth's curse?
Of course, the Ring will corrupt one into a new Sauron if one is strong enough, & the Curse is meant merely to destroy & all that, but the question is 'Is there a difference in the nature of evil as portrayed in the two books? Certainly, taken as stand-alone works the stand out difference is that in CoH evil wins & in LotR it loses. What interests me - & I've addressed this before - is that while in terms of (original) composition & of internal chronology CoH came first, in terms of publication it comes last. And its more complicated than that too, because the CoH we have now was written after LotR. In Tolkien's 'final' published M-e novel evil wins.
But what of the Ring & its corrupting influence - when one succumbs to the Ring & thus to evil one has fallen to a physical thing, but can one 'fall' in the same way to a 'curse'? Both Boromir & Turin seek glory - Boromir
through the Ring, Turin
in spite of the Curse.
In LotR we are presented with the moral: 'If you strive hard enough, are prepared to sacrifice enough, evil can be defeated' - the tale ends in hope. In CoH the 'moral' seems to be: 'Whatever you do, evil will win out'
I ended my original post:
"Sorry - a lot of rambling musings there...."
I fear that's still the case.
10-09-2007, 04:24 AM
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