[Kalimac]

Child - interesting about the "Monster Mom" [img]smilies/wink.gif[/img]. I'd thought there was something missing from the Tolkien/fairy tale motif but for some reason had forgotten the wicked stepmothers (though to be honest, when you think about the size of the story, where on earth would he find time to fit them IN?)

My own theory is pretty pedestrian and has been said before; killing off Mama is a great literary and establishes a number of things about the hero before you even set pen to paper (or fingers to keyboard, as is more likely now). Viz: The hero has endured previous emotional and possible hardship at an early and impressionable age (no Mom's apple pie, as someone said earlier), he is lacking one of the figures that usually considered an essential part of your life, and of childhood especially, which leads to some natural feelings of neglect. He also has no especially strong ties to home and does not have so many people to have to leave behind. (In a purely literary sense, imagine all the time you save getting rid of the scenes where the hero has to justify leaving Mom to fend for herself as well as having to make provision for her). Somehow Dad never comes in for quite the same sort of consideration, probably because he was presumed to be able to make his own living, whereas the mother was more dependent. It's a very easy shorthand for making the hero an outsider, loner, adventurer type with no ties and a Secret Sorrow. It makes him (or her) sympathetic right off the bat.

And I have to agree - in a qualified sense - with Dwarin, the dead mother, while a classic literary figure, has been overdone. If the story genuinely calls for the hero to be an orphan/half-orphan/whatever then there's nothing wrong with it, but too often books use it as a cheap emotional shortcut to make us feel sympathy for the hero that it would otherwise take good writing and plot structure to produce (for me the historical novels where the mother dies in childbirth are some of the worst offenders). The fact that having your mother die while you were still in childhood was previously a rather common is not an excuse for poor or lazy writing. After all, almost everyone has been painfully dumped at some point in their lives, but how many stories where that sort of thing happens are actually well-written and how many are just going for the easy emotional shots?

Sorry, didn't mean to rant so much. Tolkien, of course, was not a lazy writer, far from it - and he doesn't play the dead-mother card to make us pity the heroes, instead he simply writes about them as they are and what they are doing and makes us pity them for the horror they're currently undergoing as opposed to what they went through twenty years before the story opens. The fact that most of their mothers ARE dead, is, well....I think there just wasn't room left in the story for them. Imagine how many extra pages the leavetakings of Primula Brandybuck, Mrs. Gamgee and Theoden's Queen would have required, not to mention if Denethor's wife was still alive [img]smilies/smile.gif[/img]. Can't see her letting Denethor take Faramir to the tombs without at least a 5-page fight.