Past Trauma Influencing Characters

[Alphaelin]

I disagree with your statement that characters in an epic should not be written without internal angst.

I didn't say that characters in epic literature shouldn't be written without internal angst. I said they tend not to be written with internal angst. I will try to clarify:

In most of the epics I have read, the reader (or listener) is often not given a detailed description of the characters' inner thoughts. While there are episodes of introspection from characters such as Odysseus, most of the narrative focuses on the actions the characters take rather than on what they are thinking.

Tolkien admired the epic narrative style far more than he did drama, hence my statement that he never intended LOTR to be a psychological study. LOTR is a fairly straightforward presentation of people dealing with the challenges and hardships of a specific quest. Tolkien wrote LOTR to see if he could create a mythology for Britain.

And what of other epics, such as the movie Lawrence of Arabia or Shakespeare's plays Romeo and Juliet, MacBeth and Hamlet (to name only a few)? These may be considered epics, and in each the characters obviously have immense internal angst and their purposes are never so completely clear cut as
quote:
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destroying an evil ring, defending one's city, winning back a prized possession, getting back home again.
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While all the examples you gave are great works of art, none of them are epic literature, the style that Tolkien specialized in and loved. All of your examples are forms of drama, which depends on the spoken words of the characters to move the plot along. In drama, the devices of monologue and dialoque show the audience what characters are thinking. While screenplays differ from stage plays in that they are allowed to have bits of narration to describe action or setting, like plays they require human beings to enact the story in front of an audience.

A piece of epic liteature is "a long narrative poem in elevated style recounting deeds of a legendary or historical hero" or "a work of art that resembles or suggests an epic" or "a series of events or body of legend or tradition felt to form the proper subject of an epic". (Definition from my old Webster's Dictionary.) While the characters in LOTR have to develop and grow for the reader to stay interested in the story, the main thing for Tolkien was always to tell the story of the Quest - his "adventures of men in the Perilous Realm or upon its shadowy marches."

Regarding Boromir's reason for trying to take the Ring, we may just have different but equally valid opinions about the character. Here is my thought: Boromir is a noble and courageous man, yet he is vulnerable to the Ring's influence, which leads him to attack Frodo. My thought that it is his pride which makes it possible for the Ring to influence him is based partly on The Council of Elrond in FOTR, where he does not believe that true-hearted men would be perverted by the Ring, but largely in The Window on the West in TTT when Faramir speaks of him: " 'And this I remember of Boromir as a boy, when we together learned the tale of our sires and the history of our city, that always it displeased him that our father was not king.'" and a few lines later "If he were satisfied of Aragorn's claim, as you say, he would greatly reverence him. But the pinch had not yet come. They had not yet reached Minas Tirith or become rivals in her wars." Also in the Appendices at the end of ROTK, Boromir is spoken of as desiring glory in battle and his own glory therein. These all describe a prideful man, one who is so convinced of his superior skills on the battlefield that he could well believe himself impervious to outside influences. And since he does not regard the Ring as a danger to him, he takes no precautions to guard against its influence.