The problem of good and evil.     

This subject will not be treated completely at this time as I will be composing an essay on it.  When that is completed, I shall post that on this website under the hope that no one will "borrow" it. 

The Lord of the Rings is a childish allegory of Good versus Evil in the most simple fashion of absolutes.

To refute this oft repeated comment quickly, one need only point out the basic nature of evil in The Lord of the Rings.   The basic nature of evil, you may say, that is not a feat to be easily and quickly dispatched.  All too true, however, I mean from where evil comes, it certainly does not spring fully formed from the earth.   All evil in Tolkien's Middle-earth springs from good or the desire to do good.  From Melkor, or Morgoth, a Satan figure who  fell from grace, but without achieving a hell, because of his desire to do more than Il�vatar (God) meant for him to accomplish.  Namely, the alteration of Il�vatar's plan for Middle-earth.  Melkor eventually became the greatest enemy of the keepers and builders of Middle-earth, the Valar, who are a type of angel or powerful spirit whose forces Il�vatar used to build, not create, his vision of the world.  The Valar served somewhat as a weaver would to a rug's designer.  Eventually Melkor wished to be God to the Children of Il�vatar, thus committing a irredeemable crime of pride and willfulness.  Sauron, a lesser spirit, supplanted Melkor in his desire for all-powerful divinity.  Sauron was not created evil.  He and many other spirits (like the infamous Balrogs) were corrupted to Melkor's will, they were all originally submissive to Il�vatar and the Valar.  After defeat, however, Sauron genuinely repented and set about in an attempt to restore that which he corrupted and destroyed.   However, Sauron did not long wear this face and returned to evil.  Still upholding the facade of good, Sauron manipulated the Noldor elves' desire for knowledge into the tools he needed to make the Ring.  Instead of the most evil of Middle-earth's entities being concentrated evil, like Evil in Time Bandits, evil is the product of a fall.  To make a more popular reference, Melkor and Sauron are a kind to Darth Vader.  Darth himself at first appeared to be a flat evil character with no inner life that reached beyond being evil, doin evil  and serving evil.   However, one learns by the last Star Wars film that Darth, too, fell from grace most high;  however, where Darth receives absolution in his repentance, Sauron and Melkor never come possessed of a final repentance.

Saruman is another character at whom the finger of proof is pointed as to unrelenting evil.  Where the proofs for the above examples depend heavily on The Silmarillion, Saruman's evil is contained within The Lord of the Rings.   Saruman's evil is of knowledge, he wishes to eat of the tree of knowledge.  He wishes for the enemy's  knowledge.  In researching the enemy, Sauron, for the good of Middle-earth, he became seduced by the power incipient in evil, not available to good.  Sauron is a man of invention whose inventions come not from himself, as he believes, but from Sauron who does the equivalent of leaving footnotes on a scholar's papers to lead him to discoveries he would not have otherwise made and for that reason are not the scholar's.  Saruman also dabbles in the industrial.  He uses bomb-type weapons at Isengard.  Isengard itself is a brother to those 20th century industrial experimentations with dangerous leaks of unknown but deadly or poisonous fluids and scorched earth in which gaping wounds are present.  Saruman's turn to Sauron was not purely selfish in the beginning or even well into it.  Saruman believes that Sauron's coming will bring about an age of order, an accomplishment that he and his kind have been striving for their length on Middle-earth.  By siding with Sauron, Saruman believes that he can help direct Sauron's machinations and rule on Middle-earth to reflect the ideal of order.  Pride, like with Sauron and Melkor, is Saruman's downfall:  For how can he conceive of controlling a being who is a higher spirit of the Valar, an older spirit, a more powerful spirit.

Apart from the clashing of the great, terrible and wise, the evils of men, elves and other creatures wait.  Yes, even the elves.  Elves, like the other races, possess their own evils.  In the third age of Middle-earth, and even before though not in such concentration, the evils longed for the past.  As elves are immortal and therefore doomed to watch those things they fashioned fade and change before them, as one might watch a favourite plant die with the winter, they are ever with the desire for the beginning.  After the elves first awoke by the light of the stars on Middle-earth the Valar sent one of their kind to fetch the elves to live with them on their stronghold island.  Melkor, however, already spreading the land with evil, whispered evil about the Valar in the ears of the elves who by consequence feared the Valar.  Some elves, however, did follow the Valar to their island upon which they enjoyed a long paradise before Melkor again poisoned their thoughts.  It is back to this paradise that the elves look.  Whether they know that it is for the beginning that they mourn,their songs echo the truth.  Many of the elven songs mention starlight, the only light existent at their awakening.  Elves may be similar to those stereotypic "old folks" who wish for the "good old days" without computers,  fast cars or atomic bombs.  This melancholy desire to arrest time or turn back time is responsible for the Ring.  As Tolkien explains, "[m]ere change as such is not represented as 'evil': it is the unfolding of the story and to refuse this is of course again the design of God.  But the Elvish weakness is in these terms naturally to regret the past, and to become unwilling to face change:  as if a man were to hate a very long book still going on, and wished to settle down in a favourite chapter.  [T]hey [the elves] desired some 'power' over things as they are, to make their particular will to preservation effective:  to arrest change , and keep things always fresh and fair" (Letters, 236). 

Men,  on the other hand, forever wish to reach beyond that which they are given by nature:  Men wish for Eternal life, for onmipotent power and knowledge.   They wish, like the elves though more to their error, to achieve that which was not meant for their kind, immortality.  Pride was the fall of the great kingdom of Aragorn's fathers.  In the desire to achieve everlasting life, the king of the N�menoreans, against the dictate of the Valar that men do not sail west beyond sight of their home, sailed in the attempt to step foot on the Valar island in the mistaken notion, perpetuated by Sauron, that he would gain eternity.  Denethor, too is guilty of pride.  He attempts to use the palant�r, a mystical object of seeing, to divine the movements of the enemy and thus to counteract those movements thereby protecting his country from harm.  However, Denethor is too weak to control the palant�r and is controlled by Sauron through it.  Sauron's shows him destruction, eventually driving him to despair and death.  Denethor's pride makes him evil;  in his despair he nearly murders his fevered son, Faramir.  He did not begin the war as a despot but ended it as such.  Boromir, Denethor's son, also falls prey to pride as well as lust for power for the same reasons as his father.  Boromir wishes to possess the Ring and thereby save his country and people from Sauron's mighty army.  The Ring, an evil in of itself, slowly breaks Boromir by its presence as a power.  Boromir believes in the mistaken notion that if he were to possess the Ring, he would be able to control and defeat Sauron -- and ultimately take his place --.  However, it takes a most powerful person the control the Ring, those who possess the Ring without the power to control it become as the Ringwraiths or Gollum, shadows of self.  In his lust for power, Boromir attacks Frodo, the ring-bearer, forcing him to break the fellowship in order to escape.   But Boromir redeems himself, unlike most of the evil (meaning those who have fallen prey to Sauron of his followers) characters, by giving his life to protect the two young hobbits Merry and Pippin from Orcs though unsuccessful.

Dwarves, as evident in The Hobbit easily fall prey to lust for gold and riches.  They, like all other races and spritis on Middle-earth, can fall prey to pride. The Dwarves who build Minas Tirith delved too deep in their greed and pride --pride of workmanship and lust for mithril -- and woke the remaining Balrog, a fire spirit turned flesh from the first age.  Dwarves also also secretive and do not teach their own language to other children of Middle-earth.  They are not creatures of Il�vatar, they were created in secret by a Valar who was impatient for the awakening of men and elves.  This Valar repented to Il�vatar and so the dwarves were given souls of their own and sent to sleep that they would not wake before elves.

Hobbits possess small evils such a greed and gluttony.  However, their greatest evil is not an evil deed or thought but a lack of interest in the outside world.  Like those "neurtal" countries who turn their faces from war, the Hobbits turned their lives from  mena nd the outside world.  Becauseof their protection from "reality" and from true "evil" these creatures are easy prey to Saruman and Wormtounge.  The Hobbits, never having had to protect themselves in recent years, have fogotten how because of which their Shire is turned form a garden into an industrial mess similar to, though not as harsh as, Isengard.


4.     If the Orcs and Trolls were created from originally good beings, shouldn't they be redeemable?  If so, there is no evidence of redeemability in The Lord of the Rings.

Since Melkor created the Orcs and Trolls they are not possessed of souls.  Tolkien writes that Il�vatar granted "sub-creative" powers to the Valar to "guarantee that what they devised and made should be given the reality of Creation . . . within limits, and of course subject to certain commands or prohibitions" (Letters, 195).  Therefore, those creatures that Melkor devises would become realities, but as Il�vatar placed a ban on the making of other sentient creatures like men and elves, the creations would not have the approval of Il�vatar and therefore be not sanctified with souls.  Tolkien further remarks that "whether they could have 'souls' or 'spirits' seems a different questions;  and since in my myth at any rate I do not conceive of the making of souls or spirits, things of an equal order if not an equal power to the Valar, as a possible 'delegation'"(Letters, 195).  Thus,if Il�vatar does not grant the creatures souls, then they cannot possess souls as the Valar cannot given them such gifts.  

There is a difficulty with the above theorems;   namely, that Orcs were not created but corrupted by Melkor.  Originally the Orcs were elves, many of whom were lost on the way to the Valar paradise.  Later in the same letter quote above, Tolkien admits that he has "represented at least the Orcs as pre-existing real beings on whom the Dark Lord has exerted the fullness of his power in remodelling and corrupting them, not making them.  That God would 'tolerate' that, seems no worse theology than the toleration of the calculated dehumanizing of Men by tyrants that goes on today" (Letters, 195).  Tolkien writes further that there might be other creatures created by Melkor or Sauron whose minds as filled with the will and mind of their creator.  These creatures would not be truly individual and sentient beings but like organic computers networked to an artificially intelligent server who directs their actions.

The difficulty still presents itself.  If these creatures are redeemable, why do we not see evidence of that in The Lord of the Rings?   One answer is that Tolkien devised his novel to be seen from the eyes of hobbits, we see and ear what they see and hear.    The few times that the reader is in the textual presence of orcs, they are intent on their actions given them by their Lords.   We do not peer into the minds of the orcs except when they squabble over booty.  We see their fear and their cowardice, but they are flat characters. Perhaps if Tolkien was writing a novel about evil redeemed, we would see orcs being redeemed.  However, no one attempts to redeem these orcs, that is not the concern of the novel.

Tolkien does write about an evil almost redeemed, but the actions of a  "good" character (who still possesses his own evils) is the road down which this evil creeps almost towards the dawn.  Gollum and Frodo, mirror images and foils of one another, are inseparable as characters in Mordor.  It is only Sam's jealousy and suspicious mind, that if it had its way Strider would never have helped the hobbits in Bree, certainly dooming them.

Obviously, I have but skimmed the surface of evil and hardly touched upon good in The Lord of the Rings. However, as earlier stated, all this shall be amended when my essay is completed.

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