Quote:
Originally Posted by davem
Death may be Tolkien's theme, & the inevitability of it is clearly laid out before the reader, but the fact of ugly, violent dying is avoided not, I repeat, not because Tolkien refuses to indulge in graphic descriptions of killing, but because Tolkien's characters all tend to die clean & tidy deaths - & usually live long enough to make a moving final speech...
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Yes, but all such Tolkienish requiems, dirges, soliloquoys, threnodies, elegies and epitaphs are due to his adherence to the classical form. Here we have an 'old school' Oxford Don steeped in Beowulf and Arthurian cycle translations (and more important to my point, his love of Greek drama in his youth); thus, his prose was considered archaic in style even when it was first published (and almost alien to the bulk of fiction produced in the 40's and 50's), and hence, I suppose, its timeless quality.
Take Greek tragedy, for instance. From what I can recall of my brief encounters with Aristotle (I would add Racine and Corneille, but I'm not sure if Tolkien was interested in French tragedy), noble characters do not indulge in the gross and they do not knowingly commit reprehensible acts (these vile acts, such as cold-blooded murder, are generally reserved for the nemesis of the piece). Evil is never rewarded (which is very Tolkienesque) and those with noble character retain this inherent quality even when facing death or worse. There is a reason Tolkien coined the term
eucatastrophe from the Greek.
Boromir is a near perfect Greek tragic hero, don't you think? Boromir exhibits the four principal characteristics of a tragic hero: 1. He is of noble birth, 2. He has a tragic flaw (
hamartia), 3. He has a reversal (a
catastrophe), and 4. he undergoes a
catharthis, or recognition, a realization of his own flaw that caused his reversal. And, as is usual in Greek tragedy, his recognition comes too late to prevent his succumbing to the reversal.
Such attention to classical form leads inevitably to the death speeches (Shakespeare's plays are chock full of them), the lack of viciousness and sanguineness in the noble characters (like Aragorn or Faramir), the inevitable fall of evil characters, and the many tragic heroes in Tolkien's work that follow the Greek example (Turin and Boromir as prime examples).
I really don't think Tolkien had it in himself to portray violence of a truly sustained and graphic nature. It was just not part of his literary experience. And perhaps because he personally experienced the horrors of WWI, it stratified his reliance on classical forms, whereas other authors and poets of the WWI era sought catharsis through venting that horror, and thus are considered more 'modern' than Tolkien.