Failure and Punishment

[Aiwendil]

Lush wrote:

But this is why I like Gollum; because his character challenges and complicates this structure. In my opinion, he does this more so than Bilbo and Eowyn. Of course, he's never really as "good" as either of the two, but there are moments that disclose his capacity for being good. And whether or not he is punished when he dies in the end is also something worth pondering...

This is true; I also like Gollum for this reason. And another example of a morally ambiguous Tolkien character is my personal favourite - Turin.

But, to utter my catch phrase, there's a distinction we ought to make. To say that Tolkien's characters are often morally ambiguous is a very different thing from saying that Tolkien's world is morally ambiguous. Good and evil may be mixed in certain people, but good and evil themselves are always well-defined and distinct. There is never any question of what ends should, morally speaking, be sought, though there is often some question concerning, first, how best to go about achieving those ends, and, second, whether a particular character will in the event seek that end or not.