Building the Bad Guy

[Lalwendë]

Originally Posted by Boro

Legolas screams like a girl and Gimli starts crying and can't even look.

Classic!

That's the thing - Tolkien doesn't have to worry about offending anyone with his bad guys a lot of the time because they are unseen or even nameless terrors - not always, but I'll come back to that one later...

Tolkien makes use of classic horror/Gothic emblems to conjour up almost subconscious or primeval senses of terror within us. You do not need any knowledge of Satan to be scared of some horned beast rising out of the darkness in the way the Balrog does - he's the kind of creature every child imagines lurks somewhere in the cellar, under the stairs, in the castle dungeon, at the back of the clan's cave... Likewise with the 'dark' image of Sauron and Morgoth, the classic robed figure once seen in the symbol of the Grim Reaper or the plague doctor with his sinister beaked mask and nowadays seen in the image of Darth Vader.

That would be all too easy though, just to make your villains mysterious, thus avoiding describing their race and age. But Tolkien also has other villains who are very real and visible. Like Saruman, ostensibly a very clever and reclusive elderly man. Or Grima, a stereotypical nerd by all descriptions with his greasy hair and pale skin (hours spent playing Warcrack ). Or even Lobelia, a snobby old lady who may not turn out to be Mata Hari but she certainly gives Bilbo some unbearable grief.

The thing is, Tolkien was not scared of making us see how all people can easily slip into doing bad things, into being villains. He told us nobody was above censure, nobody immune from 'falling'. So he had no need to set up pantomime villains as everyone was a potential baddie. And yes, uncannily like Orwell's 1984, in that the ordinary people, the neighbours themselves, make it so that nobody can feel safe and secure!

Actually that's got me thinking again...just how symptomatic of the Cold War are both Lord of the Rings and 1984 in terms of baddies?! You have not only the faceless or impersonal threat in the form of Sauron/Big Brother but you also have the threat from and suspicion of your own neighbours - the Shire Quislings/Grima and the Thought Police being like the 'Reds Under The Bed'/Stasi threat. Hmmm...