Don Quaxote de la Arnor

[Inderjit S]

Don Quixote was (amongst many other things) a satircization of the knight-errantry stories which were prevalent in Europe and Spain at the time. The characters, or heroes, tended to be one-dimensional i.e. handsome, brave prince and beautiful princess. I say tend to be-knight errantry is neither my favourite genre, nor one which I specialise in, so I cannot say if it was always so.

Yet how far do the criticisms put forward in Don Quixote apply to the Lord of the Rings? Are the heroes too wooden? Salman Rushdie levelled this criticism at The Lord of The Rings some time ago-are characters such as Elrond, Gandalf and Aragorn too wooden or do they have other more human traits? Authors such as Henry Fielding and Graham Greene were able to use Cervantes’s novel to parody certain societal traits-can this be applied to The Lord of The Rings? (Anybody read Bored of the Rings?)

[NChadwick]

I would say that some of them are indeed wooden, but could also apply to this a purpose. Gandalf, for one, is not wooden. He is multi-faceted, whether stern or loving, whether doubtful or filled with unending wisdom. Yet he leaves Middle-Earth, in the end, to be guarded by a far more "wooden" character, Aragorn.

One of the major themes to LOTR is that, while it is imperative that the ring be destroyed, doing so will also cause the world to loose some of its lustor. It will lose its elves, and its greatest Wizard. And at that point it had already lost the two most intriguing, and I must insist _human_ characters...Golum and Sauron. Both, in their own ways, the tenth finger to what had been perceived as, and is now in actuality, a nine-fingered hand.

I contend, as I always must, that the "Return of the King" is not a phrase of optimism, but a phrase of fond nostalgia, and loss. Maybe Strider's woodenness is the perfect emphasis, the perfect symbol, for how the world will fade.

In closing, the many wooden characters in LOTR are, in my opinion, balanced nicely by the incredibly well-developed characters of Gandalf, Golum, Denethor, and Sauron. Those are the only four that really sparkle, but they do a nice job of it, especially (and I'm very serious about this) Sauron...who to me draws more sympathy than any non-appearing character has ever been able to draw in the literary world. And by the end of the book, all four of them have left us.

[Thorondor_]

In my belief, one important way the LotR can be read is through archetypes, Frodo the infant self, Aragorn the developed one, Galadriel the positive anima, Shelob the negative anima, Gandalf the good Old Wise Man, Saruman the bad one (and these archetypes can be found in Jung). Now, if they represent archetypes - at least in this view - in this rather imperative that they don't loose their identity as such. Furthermore, I believe Frodo is the main character of the story, he is the one that developes the most - in both story and psychology terms. For this kind of view that I enjoy, the wooden attribute simply cannot be applied.