...the morality is fairly clear cut, in terms of what they have to do, so there's not a lot of soul-searching or internal conflict....this is not at all a "modern" sensibility, which puts a lot more stress on internal character struggles and autonomy. ....
What I'm trying to suggest, is that it's this morally unambiguous/noble/heroic/Homeric quality that maybe gets Tolkien into trouble with the critics, for whom character complexity/ambiguity/nuance is seen as a necessity. To modern ears, the idea of a character acting "nobly" almost sounds like a joke. But the Iliad has worn pretty well. Different stories have power for different reasons, and I don't think harking back to a pre-modern form of storytelling makes Tolkien "trivial", as Pullman claims.
Thanks for these thoughts -- here are some further, related ones.
1.When people object to all of the good characters being good (but Boromir?), I wonder what their experience has been. My own has been that, throughout my life, my family and often my friends have behaved well, dependably. Contra what some people apparently would assume, these people haven't been prigs or hypocrites. Nor are they necessarily outstanding exemplars of the virtues; their lives wouldn't make for movie versions with wide appeal. But they have been consistent: generally patient, honest, reasonably diligent, and chaste. Conversely, any cop would probably tell you that the people who break the law are often repeat offenders, and, likely enough, got into trouble as kids before they did anything that earned them criminal records. There seems thus a degree of plausibility for
LotR's presentation of people who generally do good, and others who are bad.
2.Moving the discussion from ordinary life experience to that of art: no one will deny that great art may be written about the inner struggles of fictional characters, but perhaps few would insist that great art can only ever deal with characters who have great inner struggles. If they do thus insist, they will have to pay the price of dismissing much that the world has thought was great literature.
3.Moving the discussion from art in general to that of a particular work of fantastic imagination called
The Lord of the Rings, we should ask whether this particular book would be enhanced by such character portrayal. Would it be better, as the type of work it is -- an imaginary-world quest romance, a tale of Faerie, a work of "super science fiction" as one reviewer called it -- if Tolkien had devoted more paragraphs to character development of this particular type? I would go on to ask which characters specifically "ought to" have had such development. Whose character portrayal in the book as it stands is manifestly inadequate? What scenes fall flat because the characters are not rendered in this way? What themes are obviously starved for the substance that they need and that would have been there if Tolkien had developed some characters in this way? I don't find obvious answers to this. What I have found is that as I have grown older and my experience has included more people, my sense of the depth in the book we have, including the depth in some characters, has been enhanced. I was less intrigued by the character of Eowyn at 15 than at 55, for example.
It seems to me that
LotR holds up very well without a lot of special pleading. One has no wish to have been able to cry "Gotcha!" to Prof. Tolkien. His book isn't flawless even on its own terms; a thing that bothers me a little is: what happened to all the rock that the dwarves quarried out of Moria? But in general and with regard to innumerable specifics it really is a masterpiece and I don't suppose it will ever be surpassed in its kind.
