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Originally Posted by Fordim
Squatter are you sure you are apprehending the citation about beauty and evil correctly? You quote Tolkien as writing “to us evil and ugliness seem indissolubly allied. We find it difficult to conceive of evil and beauty together.” To me, this would appear as though he is arguing that to modern readers “us/we” evil and ugliness only “seem” to be “indissolubly allied” with the implication being that in true fairy-story this limitation of the modern imagination is overcome by a different, “older” view in which beauty and evil are not divorced but all too often commensurate. I wonder how much of the Apocryphal tradition concerning the deluding beauty of Lucifer lies behind this view?
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Good to see you again, Fordim. I'm always deeply suspicious of opinion posts that remain unchallenged in their fundamentals, particularly mine. In this case, however, you do misunderstand me. I agree with your reading of the passage I quoted, and my comments should be read in that light. I was, in fact, pointing out that Tolkien very rarely shows us beauty and evil together, although he identifies this as an element of fairy-stories, an element of which he appears to approve. In fact, he seems to regard the tendency for evil and ugliness to become conflated in the contemporary mind as a symptom of moral and aesthetic degeneration; yet despite this the motif occurs more frequently in his fiction than does that of evil beauty. Since Tolkien's use of the first person necessarily includes him in the group described, it's probable that he recognised this a tendency in his own imagination as well as that of the modern collective consciousness which he describes.
If the deluding beauty of Lucifer were not in some way involved in Tolkien's vision of evil I should be extremely surprised. Morgoth and Sauron both share qualities with the Great Adversary, who is the inevitable model for evil in the Christian mind. Lucifer was once the brightest of angels, and in at least one Anglo-Saxon poem both he and his rebel angels are portrayed as retaining the ability to appear in the angelic form that once they possessed. In fact this is central to the temptation of Eve in
Genesis B, a poem both several hundred years older and quite a lot better than
Paradise Lost. For Tolkien not to be influenced by an element of his own religion's philosophy which he would encounter regularly in his philological studies he would need to be more difficult to influence than even C.S. Lewis thought. I suspect that the same motif had influenced medieval fantastic fiction, whence come many of Tolkien's theories about fairy-stories.
Unfortunately time is short, so I must break off here. Really I only wanted to clarify my point above, and I hope that I've managed to do so.