noWizardme
Gondolin
Jul 29, 5:09pm
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Some reviewers have called the whole thing [LOTR] simple-minded, just a plain fight between Good and Evil, with all the good just good, and the bad just bad. Pardonable, perhaps (though at least Boromir has been overlooked) in people in a hurry, and with only a fragment to read, and, of course, without the earlier written but unpublished Elvish histories. But the Elves are not wholly good or in the right. Not so much because they had flirted with Sauron; as because with or without his assistance they were ‘embalmers’. They wanted to have their cake and eat it: to live in the mortal historical Middle-earth because they had become fond of it (and perhaps because they there had the advantages of a superior caste), and so tried to stop its change and history, stop its growth, keep it as a pleasaunce, even largely a desert, where they could be ‘artists’–and they were overburdened with sadness and nostalgic regret. In their way the Men of Gondor were similar: a withering people whose only ‘hallows’ were their tombs. But in any case this is a tale about a war, and if war is allowed (at least as a topic and a setting) it is not much good complaining that all the people on one side are against those on the other. Not that I have made even this issue quite so simple: there are Saruman, and Denethor, and Boromir; and there are treacheries and strife even among the Orcs.”
Letter 154 (1954) - with my bolds
I notice Tolkien doesn't call this 'embalming' an 'evil' thing (whether it is achieved by Sauron-flirtation or otherwise, though it comes to rely upon Rings of Power thereby putting the elves in the fix we observe in LOTR) I think it could be argued it was 'evil'. 'Sinful' is more the sense I get from Tolkien's comments, in that the desire ismorally wrong, and that moral point stands however they were to go about achieving it.
To that I'd like to add an observation, though it may be not very related to my first point. It's that I think we see elves in LOTR and TH from a mortal point of view - ethereal, mysterious, angelic superior beings who might never be fully comprehensible by mortals. And at any rate are 'above my likes and dislikes' as Sam says.
I think that's different in the Sil. I don't know whether that's because we see the Sil. elves more as seen by other elves; or whether our Third-age hobbit heroes just happened not to meet any elves who are 'wrong uns'; or whether it is something to do with changes in Tolkien's thought about things over the long time during which he was writing.
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"I am not made for querulous pests." Frodo 'Spooner' Baggins.
(This post was edited by noWizardme on Jul 29, 5:20pm)
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