Thoughts About Dark Versus Light

[Birdland]

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.

"tragic flaw--the one problem of temperament that brings to ruin an otherwise noble character."

Tolkien wasn't the first to come up with this idea. The idea of the tragic hero goes clear back to the Greeks. In fact, it is widely held that no character can be truely considered tragic unless he has a dark flaw that must be overcome.

In the case of Boromir, his tragic flaw was not the lust for the ring, but his Pride. His feeling that his own line should have long ago been made Kings of Gondor, rather than "merely" Stewards, and his belief that the Race of Men, particularly the Men of Gondor, were the epoch of all the Races of Middle Earth, left him an easy mark for the Ring's power to corrupt and use. In the end he fell, and only regained the status of hero through the ulimate sacrifice, death.

I'm still up in the air whether Frodo could have been considered to have a "tragic flaw", unless it was as Sam thought; that he was "good to the point of blindness". Did Frodo become more Noble only because the Ring darkened his soul? Yet it was the very innocence of Hobbits that made them the perfect candidate to carry the Ring to its distruction. Hobbits had no "dark side" that the Ring could bring to light and use. Or if they did, it was buried so deep that it took standing in the very heart of Sauron's realm to bring it to light.