[Lomelinde]

Wow. You are to be commended for such excellent and intelligent insights into the more subtle works at play in Tolkien's world. Something brought to my mind as I read that exchange was the literary idea of each "good" protaganist having a foil, or another "bad" antagonist balancing him out. Of course, that's rather cut and dried, and Tolkien was such a skilled writer that he caused the classic ideologies of good and evil to be merely relativistic and showed that everyone, regardless of which side he was on, had a dark side. In another words, he showed that there is no such thing as "pure evil" or "pure good". Great observations on the darker characters balncing out the "heroes", for lack of a better term.Very interesting.