Lord of the Rings: Good and Evil

Pride, cooperation, mercy, and redemption in Middle-earth

Jude: Thomas wanted us to have a discussion about “problematic” antagonists, first with Lord of the Rings and then next week with Dune. I insisted on broadening the topic to each author’s notions of good and evil because I want to avoid doing the thing where we just peer into the soul of the author to try to determine exactly how racist and sexist they were. Both these men belonged to times and cultures with different values from ours.

Thomas: Sure, the author is dead, literally for both of these books, but I think we are interested in the authors. You’re happy to talk at length about how, say, Tolkien’s background in languages gives Lord of the Rings a texture unique both in its time and today. So why wouldn’t we also consider Tolkien’s evil characters in the same way?

Jude: It’s different because saying Tolkien’s use of language is cool isn’t a moral judgment on him or the authors we compare him against.

Thomas: And you’re afraid of moral judgments?

Jude: There’s a strain of discussion in Internet circles that pours over art from the past and eagerly looks for reasons to tear it down. I think rather than trying to produce art that is worthy of being placed alongside or even above the great works of the past, people would rather find ways to morally disqualify the art of the past from consideration so they don’t have to compete with it.

Thomas: That’s a remarkably cynical take from you! That’s supposed to be my job. Anyway, your point sounds like the complaint artists have been making about critics for thousands of years: “Stop pointing out flaws in my work and make your own…if you can!"

I think it’s totally reasonable for people to want cultural products that align with and reinforce their own values, especially when—as with Lord of the Rings and Dune—we’re talking about material often consumed by impressionable teenagers.

But it’s hard enough to say anything new about Tolkien, let’s not make our challenge worse by trying to say something new about literary “cancel culture” as well.

Jude: Okay, then where should we start?

Thomas: I propose we go ahead and first apply the values we have in 2024 to Lord of the Rings and allow ourselves to be unafraid of what we might find. Then we can talk about what Tolkien himself was trying to do and whether it all makes sense even by his own standards. He thought about these things much more deeply than the typical modern author, but, spoiler alert, he still wasn’t perfectly consistent.

Jude: All right, but this sounds like it’s going to be a lot of nitpicking to me. I think it was Emerson who said that a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds. Isn’t a hobgoblin a type of orc?

Thomas: The Internet tells me that Tolkien only uses the term “hobgoblin” once, in The Hobbit, and implies when he does that hobgoblins are bigger than regular goblins. But in a letter, Tolkien admitted that in folklore, hobgoblins are actually smaller. So perhaps he would say: small hobgoblins are the consistency of foolish minds.

Jude: You did it. You just said what surely is a brand new thing about Lord of the Rings. Maybe we should quit while we’re ahead.

Thomas: There’s no fun in that. I wanted to start with our modern values, and we modern folk do not care about hobgoblins. Or even goblins, really, since we are focusing on Lord of the Rings.

Jude: Since you insist, I will say at the outset that I think Tolkien looks better when viewed through a modern lens than anyone should have any right to expect. He is clear-eyed about the horrors of war, he literally focuses on the little people and not just the Great Men of history, and there’s little overt sexism or racism despite Lord of the Rings being written in a time where most books were riddled with both. In fact, there’s even a little genuinely feminist material with Eowyn, although we’ll save the role of women in the story for another article. And the Fellowship of the Ring is literally an act of multiracial, multicultural unity. Legolas and Gimli, in particular, learn to look past their own prejudices and become the best of friends. Clearly Tolkien is all about diversity, equity, and inclusion.

Thomas: I agree he does pretty well if you are grading on a curve, but you’ve also got to admit: when you consider representation, it’s a disaster. Hardly any women anywhere, and although there are different races in the fantasy sense of hobbits, elves, dwarves, and men (Tolkien always uses “men” to mean humans, which really clangs on the modern ear), these different races all seem to amount to different types of white people.

Jude: Although Tolkien himself didn’t quite articulate this himself, fans have often seen his work as creating a mythology for England, or perhaps a mythology for northwestern Europe more generally. For all its epic scope, Lord of the Rings clearly takes place in a small, northwest portion of Middle-earth. It doesn’t exclude anyone but, uh, it just so happens to be about white people.

Thomas: Mm-hmm.

Jude: Not every story has to involve every people from every part of the world!

Thomas: Sure, but Lord of the Rings does have some things to say about those other places. It’s not completely clear, but the story strongly implies that they are all under the sway of Sauron and send him human troops for his armies. Two of the five angelic wizards are sent to those foreign lands, but evidently they failed and they are never heard from again. Saruman was also with them for a time, and that’s another way in which he’s suspicious from the start and contaminated by harmful ideas. There’s nothing overt, but you have to admit there’s a decent amount of subtle xenophobia baked in here. Western Europe is not only good, it’s almost unique in having the ability to be good.

Jude: First, I’ll note in passing that Tolkien started to revise these ideas near the end of his life. Since the rest of Middle-Earth is so much bigger than the part where the story takes place but Sauron doesn’t have overwhelming numbers of human soldiers, he decided that Sauron must not have actually controlled the rest of it, and that the two wizards must have helped disrupt his domination.

But as far as the sense we get in Lord of the Rings, I know today we inevitably leap to a racial view of this, but I think in Tolkien’s day, a religious view would be more common. For many centuries, Europeans saw Europe as a bastion of Christianity in an otherwise fallen world before the process of colonization made Christianity the worldwide religion it is today. There’s no explicit religion in Lord of the Rings, but it is the “West” that is most influenced by the elves and by extension the angelic Valar.

Thomas: The idea of “the west” opposed to “the east” was very common in the Cold War, with the west standing for freedom and religion against the atheist tyranny of the USSR. Lord of the Rings was written only at the beginning of the Cold War, so it’s a little surprising it inhabits that mindset. Historically, Christianity itself came from the east.

Tolkien basically inverts this. In the Silmarillion, he leaves Eden in the east but contrives a way for all good and righteous things to nevertheless come from the west. If you view the Silmarillion as the Bible of the elves, then Beleriand is similar to the Levant and Númenor is like Constantinople. Like the Levant and Constantinople from the perspective of Europeans, both are catastrophically lost. But geographically they were both west of where Lord of the Rings takes place, not east of it.

Jude: Maybe the Holy Land should be Tol Eressëa? But I think we’re getting too far afield in these analogies

Thomas: You’re right. The point here is really just that, in a way we should be uncomfortable with today, Tolkien locates “good” in a certain part of the globe and even in a cardinal direction. There is, must I say it, no such thing in history. Christian nations weren’t necessarily “better” than other nations even judged by their own moral standard. And while we recently had a lot of people eager to see Christianity and Islam as fundamentally opposed, the Christian and Islamic nations of the past were more likely to play power politics than worry too much about who believed what, as when France and the Ottoman Turks were allies for centuries to counterbalance the Hapsburgs.

Jude: But Tolkien really doesn’t care about geopolitics. Previously you’ve said that it’s not productive to yell at him for things like monarchy when he doesn’t really care about government; I think we were right to say that, and surely the same thing applies here. So is that it for your modern scolding?

Thomas: No. I also have to say that it’s weird that “race” is a real thing in Tolkien and much subsequent fantasy fiction. In real life, race is at best a murky concept. There’s obviously some association with genetic traits like skin color, but overall race in our culture is socially constructed whereas Tolkien’s races are genetically essential with really huge biological differences.

Jude: I don’t think that’s “problematic” at all! His races are obviously not the same thing as what our culture struggles with, and if anything, having obviously fanciful races helps undermine our skin color prejudices concept. Arwen chooses to be human instead of an elf and it’s not a matter of social construction. She doesn’t just “pass” as human. Instead, it has some metaphysical effect where she somehow stops being immortal and gets the “gift” of human death. There’s a massive divide between her and Aragorn, but they marry anyway. Against that, how could anyone have a problem with interracial marriage? When Tolkien was writing, plenty of people did.

Thomas: You can’t celebrate the fellowship as a glorious, multiracial coalition if you’re saying the races aren’t the same thing. Also, there’s the problem that there’s an entire other race with human-like intelligence that is irredeemably evil.

Jude: Yeah, the orc thing just sucks. I assume in the next part you’ll want to go into more detail about it.

Thomas: Yep. People still get enormously mad at CS Lewis for sending Susan Pevensie to hell for liking makeup, but at least he let a well-intentioned guy from the “bad people” into heaven! His buddy Tolkien couldn’t manage this.

Jude: Anything else you want to complain about while we inflict present day values on a seventy year old book? Going to complain about all the meat eating?

Thomas: Well, there’s either not enough gay people or too many gay people, depending on how you categorize people.

Jude: Yeah, that’s definitely what people think when they say Tolkien is problematic: not enough heterosexual representation.

Thomas: I’m just saying there’s very few women around and none of the men seem to mind. Perhaps you could say Tolkien was ahead of his time on asexuality.

Jude: Surely this is a clear sign we’ve exhausted this part of the discussion. Let’s go to your other category.

Thomas: Wait, can we talk about Treebeard being an incel?

Jude: No. We are absolutely not going to talk about that.

Thomas: “My life sucks. Hoo-hoom. There’s no women out there for me. Hrm-hum. It’s definitely not anything I said or did. Every single woman just coincidentally stopped talking to me and moved away.”

Jude: No! The other category.

Thomas: Okay, well, like you said this is mainly going to amount to an inquisition on the orc business, but we have to start by considering good and evil in Tolkien’s own terms. What would you say his view of evil is?

Jude: In the Silmarillion, we get a creation narrative that transposes the basic genesis story into a story about God giving a theme to a choir of angels. But the greatest angel, Melkor, is proud and wants to sing his own music and refuses to follow the correct theme.

Thomas: There’s a bit of Milton’s Satan in that. Melkor the rugged individualist.

Jude: That’s why the choir analogy is inspired. You really have to have harmony in a choir. Anyway, the song they sing basically becomes both space and time, so all the events of all human history past and future are part of the song. All the bad things that happen in the world, from war and murder and infant mortality to splinters and the rain that starts to fall just when you’re too far from home to go back and get an umbrella…that’s all Melkor’s wrong notes.

Thomas: And like Milton’s Satan, Melkor’s big sin is pride.

Jude: Yes, because it leads to selfishness. Melkor was already the greatest angel, but he wasn’t satisfied with the biggest role in the choir. He wanted to completely dominate the world instead of simply allowing his influence to meld with that of other angels.

Thomas: So to relate this biblical stuff to the issues of today, I see an echo here in the tension between the idea of individuals succeeding on merit (a somewhat right-wing idea in the United States, at least) contrasted against an egalitarianism that views everyone as equal.

Jude: Tolkien absolutely believes different people have very different capacities, but it’s a sin to take pride in abilities that, being innate, are gifts from God and not anything you did yourself. The humble hobbit has a strength of his or her own, and more importantly, great value. In fact, moral value is completely decoupled from innate abilities and at least implied to be more often found in those having less. Fëanor is a great artist, but he’s clearly a terrible person.

Thomas: I called Tolkien a reactionary in an earlier discussion, but I’d say this seems vaguely progressive. Some progressives today are uncomfortable with even admitting differences in ability, but as long as they go that far, they’ll be on board with a hard separation of that ability from the worth of a person. Whereas on the right, even though it’s been a century since anyone genuinely advocated for something like an aristocracy, there’s still a lingering sense that good and great go together.

That said, I think what makes Tolkien seem right-wing is that he doesn’t seem to believe in the power of government to help increase equality.

Jude: Tolkien really goes out of his way to have wise characters like Gandalf say hobbits are great people, but no one reaches the obvious conclusion that if they’re so great, maybe the hobbits should be in charge at the end of the story instead of Aragorn or Faramir. Tolkien respects great artists, but he can’t endorse meritocracy or technocracy because he's got what we might call a libertarian streak in him that really, really, really doesn’t like people being forced to do anything.

Sauron and Saruman want to order the world, initially be out of a good desire to improve it, but because they are too proud to tolerate dissent, this desire leads to tyranny and domination. Aragorn is king at the end of the story, the rightful ruler of the Shire, but because he’s a good king, he basically doesn’t tell them to do anything. Whether he collects taxes from the Shire isn’t discussed but it sure seems unlikely. There’s no evidence that anyone collects taxes anywhere in Middle-earth, in fact.

Thomas: Naturally people on the Internet have checked this. Sauron and the (fairly evil by this point) Númenóreans collect “tribute” and Saruman’s evil regime in the Shire might also tax people. Meanwhile, the only reference to good people doing anything like taxes is a mention at the Council of Elrond of the Beornings collecting tolls.

Jude: Surely we’re not going to endorse the famous George R. R. Martin criticism that we don’t know Aragorn’s tax policies, something we both said we didn’t agree with previously.

Thomas: Tolkien doesn’t care about the details of government and that’s fine, but it was worth mentioning here because Tolkien very well understands that medieval governments needed taxes to equip and feed armies. And if soldiers aren’t paid, they pay themselves by looting. He knows that, but heintentionally leaves that stuff out because he doesn’t like it.

Jude: Buried in the details of the Shire, it mentions that they claim they sent archers to help the King of Gondor in a battle against the Witch-King. This is how Tolkien likes to see people relating to a king: since the king is fighting the forces of evil, we will voluntarily send some people to help. But there’s no taxes to fund his army and there’s no conscription of young men from the villages.

Tolkien rarely seems to draw much from classical Greece and Rome, but to me this reminds me of the ancient Greek self-conception as citizens defending their homes against the slave soldiers whipped into battle by the Great King of Persia.

Thomas: Sure, but you rightly call it a “self-conception”. In actuality Athens and especially Sparta were slave societies. The moment Athens got a leg up on their neighbors, they became a despotic empire themselves.

That’s probably why Tolkien prefers to focus on Germanic tribes who apparently had some quasi-democratic institutions but where there isn’t enough written history to know any details about how they coerced people.

Jude: Tolkien’s model leader is Gandalf, who is almost always the smartest and most knowledgeable person in a room but who virtuously chooses to lead through inspiration rather than coercion. The most powerfully “good” being in Middle-earth is Tom Bombadil, an entity so pure he can only react beneficially in the moment to what is happening to him. He cannot use his enormous power for any future plan whatsoever. That constraint is necessary to make him safe enough for Tolkien to imagine him as good.

Thomas: There’s an old strain of Christianity which viewed planning for the future was innately suspect, a thing merchants did to try to trick people out of money. The most virtuous thing to do is live in the moment and trust God with the rest. I think that’s mostly been expunged from Christianity, but Tolkien doesn’t seem to trust things that operate above the scale of the interpersonal.

That’s probably why he doesn’t trust money as a store of goodness. Today, many people treat giving to various types of charities as equivalent to directly doing good, and I suppose in the past giving to the Church served the same purpose, but the only charity we see in Lord of the Rings is Aragorn using his medical knowledge to help the sick and injured.

Jude: Aragorn’s life pre-Lord of the Rings is portrayed as a sort of charity. He and the other Rangers risk their lives in the wilds to protect the unknowing villagers of the Shire and places like Bree.

Thomas: That still involves Aragorn marching out there with his buddies and killing trolls or something. There’s no sign of the real-world equivalent of this, where Aragorn and his buddies force villages to send able-bodied young men to Rivendell and then those guys have to go up and fight trolls. And when a village doesn’t cooperate, they order the young men to go sack the village in punishment.

Jude: Again, we said that Tolkien is only interested in the interpersonal. He doesn’t necessarily posit that this is a utopia we can achieve, he just wants to dramatize the interpersonal and not the political.

Thomas: Right, but having established all that, we turn to Tolkien’s antagonists. Melkor, Sauron, and Saruman all fit into the template of pride leading to a desire to dominate. But whereas there’s a lot of continuity with the good characters—I think Gandalf, Aragorn, and Frodo all act according to similar virtues—the low-ranking bad guys don’t try to dominate others.

Jude: I think they’re just too weak to do that, so they try to hold what they can for themselves. Gollum tries to keep the Ring all to himself, at least in the revised version of The Hobbit. The orcs we meet in Lord of the Rings seem more interested in looting and banditry when they aren’t forced to serve Sauron. And Wormtongue is a thief who is promised Éowyn in return for helping Saruman.

Thomas: The key observation here, which lots of people have already discussed in excruciating detail elsewhere on the Internet, is that Lord of the Rings portrays the orcs like bandits but also as kind of mean stereotypes of poor and uneducated people. Even according to Tolkien’s own value system, in fact perhaps especially by it, their humble lives should have value and worth. But instead, they are irredeemably evil and present in the story just so that the good guys can slaughter them in vast numbers. Saruman’s human allies are allowed to surrender, but there’s never any thought of extending the same mercy to orcs. According to the narrative, they will run away in fear, but they never surrender, which is hard to believe.

Jude: Tolkien himself was unhappy about this. Originally he thought the orcs might have been made out of mud and therefore had no souls, but an element of his conception of evil we haven’t mentioned yet is the idea that evil cannot create, only pervert. I suppose this follows from the Christian idea that God created literally everything, even Satan, and is the omnipotent “author” of history. Tolkien’s metaphysics, even the choir analogy, is centered on the idea that God is an artist and that pursuing art is good (“subcreation” he famously called it).

But this means Melkor cannot create orcs, trolls, dragons, and so on. He can only twist existing things into these corrupt forms. This pattern extends down the chain of being. The people of Gondor make statues; orcs can only vandalize them. But this led him to the unpleasant idea that elves must have been corrupted into orcs through a dysgenic breeding program. Late in life he realized this was a problem, but he died without having found a good solution.

Thomas: It’s nice that he realized the problem, but that just shows what a big problem it is. They have an essentially human intelligence, so they really ought to be redeemable. Instead, Tolkien uses them comedically.

Jude: Not comedically, or at least not just comedically. I think they put into practice his feelings about evil. Perhaps his original intention was to represent orcs as perfectly obedient, sort of like machines. And in Lord of the Rings it is implied that while Sauron lives, the orcs can’t help but obey him. We see that a lot today, actually, because robots are the only sort of henchmen a modern hero can kill. But armies of clockwork enemies are in their own way a lot more threatening than the hapless orcs.

It reminds me of the idea you still often hear that fascists make the trains run on time. But I doubt Tolkien believed this about fascists (and indeed it doesn’t seem to have been true). For him, evil creatures only cooperate out of fear, which is to say they can barely cooperate at all. The voluntary association of the free peoples of Middle Earth makes them strong and formidable in battle, not weaker, because they can cooperate effectively. And when evil creeps in, as with Wormtongue or Denethor, the result is fractiousness and mistrust. Since the orcs are thoroughly evil, they have these problems more thoroughly than any of the free societies.

Fiction, historiography, and even political commentary often wants to say that a free society is weaker than tyranny. Sometimes this is because we want to situate ourselves as the underdog, or to make past victories in World War II or the Cold War feel even bigger victories than they were. But I think Tolkien is right that freedom is a strength, not a weakness that we altruistically accept.

Thomas: Stirring words. I just wish some orcs could surrender. If Sauron dominates their minds and forces them to obey, that’s a bit gross, but okay. But when he dies, the orcs run away but still can’t give up.

Jude: I guess there’s no real defense on that point, but I do want to say that our culture is still grappling with this all these decades later. The recent Star Wars trilogy thinks about it long enough to show a stormtrooper defecting, then somehow it immediately forgets this happened and the heroes—including the former stormtrooper!—gleefully kill hundreds of them for the rest of the trilogy

Thomas: I guess the Saturday morning cartoons of our childhood were ahead of their time. We grew up watching the Ninja Turtles slaughtering ninjas left and right…robot ninjas. Shredder had an implausibly high robotics budget. I remember being kind of shocked when the first “live action” movie came out and there were actually human ninjas working for Shredder.

Jude: Don’t forget GI Joe where instead of stormtroopers always missing and the heroes being really accurate, they had a more egalitarian vision where GI Joe and Cobra soldiers fire lasers by the thousands at each other and no one ever hits anything. Vehicles were allowed to be blown up, but only because its human occupants would dive or parachute to safety.

Thomas: I guess this is another answer to the “what will future generations hate us for” game. When they finish ranting about how many of us still eat meat, they will yell at us for enjoying fiction where the heroes violently kill people.

But one more point about the surrender of orcs. You mentioned Star Wars, but it’s worth noting the original Star Wars trilogy is deeply centered on the idea of redemption. The stormtroopers don’t get to surrender, but Darth Vader, who surely is a far worse person than any stormtrooper, is able to become good again.

Jude: We don’t discuss movie franchises here, but I hope you’re not about to claim Star Wars is superior for saying that a guy who chopped up children with a lightsaber and participated in the cold-blooded murder of a billion people on Alderaan should get to be a happy ghost just because in the last ten seconds of his life he was such an amazingly good and selfless person that he very reluctantly killed Space Hitler to save the life of his biological son.

Thomas: I’m just saying it’s interesting that Star Wars—in other respects a story that wants to align its spirituality with vaguely Buddhist notions—has redemption as a central motif. If Tolkien had done the same, we’d be saying it was his Christianity coming through. But, alas, redemption is nowhere to be found.

Jude: Gollum destroys the Ring.

Thomas: Sure, by accident. And Frodo’s mercy is rewarded, not by Gollum turning his life around and becoming Sméagol again, but by Gollum accidentally destroying the ring and dying in the process. Theoden lets Wormtongue go, and he is rewarded by his allies gaining a palantír. Back in the Silmarillion, the greatest of the angels, Manwë, lets Morgoth go after he is captured, and is rewarded…wait, that one was an incredibly terrible decision by the allegedly wise Manwë that worked out horribly for the entire world.

But the point is, Tolkien is pro-mercy, but whereas today we usually portray mercy as being necessary because those receiving it are somehow deserving of it, in Tolkien’s work, mercy is extended to those who don’t deserve it and the people who get the mercy don’t benefit much from it. But we should do it anyway because it somehow turns out to help the person who extended the mercy via some unlikely chain of events.

Jude: That seems a little unfair. Gandalf’s famous “many die that deserve life” line just argues that you can’t be sure about who deserves what.

Thomas: I just think it’s interesting that while we have various examples of people who started good going bad—

Jude: Every bad character started good. Not just Saruman, but Sauron too was good originally. Everything that comes from God is initially good for Tolkien.

Thomas: Except the orcs, they’re bad from the start. But I was saying, it’s weird there’s not a single character who goes from bad to good.

Jude: There’s so many characters, are you really sure there isn’t at least one?

Thomas: I can’t think of any.

Jude: You aren’t thinking hard enough. Galadriel rebels along with the other Noldor and then repents and goes back to the West.

Thomas: I did think of her and she doesn’t count. Tolkien creates her for Lord of the Rings, then goes back to the Silmarillion to jam her into it. But he wants to have it both ways: she’s a fierce and important person in the revolt, but wait, no, she fights hard against Fëanor to try to prevent the kinslaying and pretty much at no point does she ever do anything bad. She just hides out in Doriath for the whole remainder of the First Age.

Jude: That seems like a technicality, but fine, I’ve got another one.

Thomas: Who?

Jude: Lobelia Sackville-Baggins. She spends most her life greedy and envious of Bag End, but she’s imprisoned during the war and gets out to find her son has been murdered. This seems to teach her humility and empathy. She humbly gives Bag-End back to Frodo, and when she dies, she requests in her will that Frodo use her fortune to help homeless Hobbits.

Thomas: Fine, you got me, but you had to reach pretty far down the character list for that.

Jude: Since I just won a decisive victory, this seems like a good spot to wrap this up. Next week we’ll think about the very different portrayal of good and evil in Frank Herbert’s Dune.