Turin the Hopeless?

[davem]

Originally Posted by littlemanpoet

In other words, if someone has lost faith, feels betrayed and disrespected, he is excused from looking the other way, full well knowing that his "colleagues" are raping and pillaging? This is rather horrific reasoning, don't you think?

No, it doesn't excuse it, it merely explains it. And as I pointed out, when he is forced to confront the reality of their behaviour he puts a stop to it.

Not all warriors would do that. Then again, it is possible that Aragorn, for example, might have been able to look the dragon in the eye and not been bespelled because of his no doubt greater store of wiscome, character, and nobility. But that's speculation.

But the point is Turin would not have known the full consequences of looking into the Dragon's eye. And maybe not all warriors would have done it - but the type of warrior Turin was would have.

Are you saying that if you had been in Turin's place, experienced what he had, had no faith (because of everything you'd been through), had been, from childhood up, living in a war zone, never knowing when you or those you loved might be killed or enslaved, given your life over to defending your adopted people - mostly living rough too - having lost your parents & sisters through their imprisonment, death or your being sent away in childhood to a strange land ... that having been through all that & more you would never have made one mistake, one bad judgement in the heat of the moment, or done some really stupid things - even wrong things? The most I can say is that I hope I wouldn't have behaved in the way Turin did, but to be frank I can't say I wouldn't.

As I stated earlier, Frodo, Sam, Aragorn - these are characters we like to identify with, because they do what we hope we'd do in a similar situation. But if we're honest, we're all much more like Turin. I think that's why some readers are made so uncomfortable by him.

Of course, I would have to ask, given that you consider him such a selfish, narcissistic jerk, you want the reference to his killing of Morgoth to be included?

To broaden the discussion: Just come across CS Lewis review of LotR

"The book is like lightning from a clear sky... To say that in it heroic romance, gorgeous, eloquent, and unashamed, has suddenly returned at a period almost pathological in its anti-romanticism, is inadequate... It marks not a return but an advance or revolution: the conquest of new territory. Nothing quite like it was ever done before."

What about that? Lewis praises LotR for its 'romanticism', & sees it as a reaction against, almost an antidote to, the pathological anti-romanticism prevalent at the time. It strikes me that CoH, by contrast, could be described as pathologically anti-romantic.

Yet, it was in the idealistic 60's that LotR really took off in popularity, not in the 50's. LotR wasn't taken up by those 'anti-romantics' of the 50's, but by the romantics of the 60's. And now, in the anti-romantic, cynical, frightened & fanatical world of the early 21st century, we have CoH topping the bestseller lists across the world.