Does Lord of the Rings lack moral ambiguity?

[butterweedstrover]

Before you click away, I promise this will be less controversial than my last thread. It is also on an entirely different subject, so this is not a discussion on whether or not LOTR is literature. 

ASOIAF, despite all its flaws, I think attempts at moral ambiguity. This is to say the line between good and evil is blurred. Not always, but on occasion. The counter-point to this 'critique' of Tolkien is that the evil (Sauron, the Orcs, etc.) are plot devices and the true moral dilemma lies within the characters. That is the conflict within people like Boromir, Gollum, Aragorn, and all the rest.  

But in that regard I find the debate is still clearly divided into good and evil. It is not a question of which path is 'right', but whether or not said characters can overcome temptation. Tolkien who wished to replicate Christian morality has much to gain from this framing. The option is always binary and the choice distinct and clear. This is where the notion of black and white morality comes from, that despite the challenges there is never any question as to what is good and what is bad. And I don't buy into the concept of sacrifice or whether that is sufficiently explored (but that is for another day). 

But is moral ambiguity always necessary? I don't think so. The Queen of Hearts in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland is clearly evil, or at least her evil is not morally ambiguous. Decapitating people for missing their turn at a game of croquet is not treated as a moral conundrum. But the Queen of Hearts serves a purpose, not to represent evil, but to create logical conundrums that are intellectually nonsense. Nothing would be gained from making her actions morally ambiguous. 

There are also attempts where rather than put into question the act itself, a story justifies the villain by giving them a tragic backstory. This device I think is very poor, and I should say serves no purpose but to undermine the narrative strength. Other times writers tack-on moral complexity like with Thanos (in the Marvel films) which I think hurts the goal of the movies (which is about conjuring the superhero or the ubermensch) and contradicts their own themes. 

However, because Lord of the Rings is so centered around the nature of good and evil, the clear cut definitions rather bored me and I thought it could be a better story with some more depth behind the moralizing. But then it would not be the Christian ethics that were so important to Tolkien's recreation of a British Mythology. So I think he would never do it otherwise because it would defeat the purpose of this carefully constructed world.        

[The Marquis de Leech]

The Lord of the Rings does present us with a Good/Evil distinction, but the point is that it is hard to be Good. Very, very hard. In some cases impossible. Frodo fails, of course, though no-one would condemn him for it. Denethor fails too, not because he succumbs to an external Evil, but because his rationalist/political realist mindset cannot Believe, leading to despair. Tolkien is making an Augustinian critique of Stoic Ethics, only to confront Augustine with Boethian Providence.

Watching the characters themselves struggle with Being Good is an interesting exercise, because it is contrary to the consequentialist ethical systems that pervade, say, ASOIAF. Saruman being granted mercy results in the horrors of the Scouring, but that is not the point (rather, granting mercy is the right thing to do). George RR Martin uses Ned Stark as a comment on such a worldview, and yet if you disentangle morality from consequence, Ned is not the fool Martin's text makes him out to be. By the same token, Saruman himself is Tolkien's comment on consequentialist ethics, and the point is driven home that even Sauron himself did not start out Evil, nor does he actually see himself as such (Sauron wants order, of course). The Lord of the Rings is emphatically not Manichean. 

Something like The Children of Hurin is, by contrast, a sort of Norse-flavoured take on the Book of Job, putting characters in a situation where (unlike The Lord of the Rings) Good really seems to have abandoned them.  

[The Marquis de Leech]

I think you are implicitly assuming that there is no depth to Objective Morality because it is Objective. Which rather boggles the mind.

[polishgenius]

It does lack moral ambiguity, but not moral complexity. I think people confuse the two quite a lot when framing arguments against Tolkien, but just coz within this setting it's unquestionable what is good and evil for the most part, doesn't mean morally ambiguous and complex characters don't exist. Whether that approach is for you is another thing, but the complexity is definitely there. As Marquis alludes to, even moreso in the backstory books.

 

13 hours ago, butterweedstrover said:

which I think hurts the goal of the movies (which is about conjuring the superhero or the ubermensch)

As an aside, this is something that you did in the other topic too and it's perhaps contributing some of us to reading your tone more hostile or at least prescriptive than you make it- I know 'death of the author' is a thing and anyone can take whatever they want from a piece of fiction, but when when you talk about goals like this you've crossed from your own view on what they wrote to ascribing motivations to the author themself, contradictorily in this case because by your own admission their own work isn't aiming towards those goals.   

[C.T. Phipps]

Ambiguity?

No.

The choices of good vs. evil is pretty clear. However, it does have characters who struggle with the concepts or exist on a spectrum. The clearest example being Denethor who is a person who is clearly opposed to Sauron and a "good" person but (correctly) believes Gandalf intends to replace him and his line despite the fact the line of Isildur is one that failed. I'd argue that Tolkien actually grapples with the issue far more in THE HOBBIT books, ironically, where Thorin and company are pretty shady characters even in-universe.

[Iskaral Pust]

3 hours ago, C.T. Phipps said:

Ambiguity?

No.

The choices of good vs. evil is pretty clear. However, it does have characters who struggle with the concepts or exist on a spectrum. The clearest example being Denethor who is a person who is clearly opposed to Sauron and a "good" person but (correctly) believes Gandalf intends to replace him and his line despite the fact the line of Isildur is one that failed. I'd argue that Tolkien actually grapples with the issue far more in THE HOBBIT books, ironically, where Thorin and company are pretty shady characters even in-universe.

This points to a certain moral subjectivity rather than objectivity in Tolkien’s works, one that generally favors romantic, nostalgic conservatism.  Why should Gondor leap to acclaim a stranger after centuries?  Why should Laketown burn for the ambition of a stranger?  Dispossessed kings do not have an objective moral superiority but Tolkien’s narrative bestows one upon them — whether noble or tragic.  ASOIAF was more nuanced about this through Varys, although still couldn’t resist the romance of dispossessed lineages reclaiming their “birthright”.

[Lord Varys]

There are pretty much no moral dilemmas in LotR because it is quite clear what is the right thing to do, always.

There certainly are characters who do wrong things but they all know what the right thing is and decide to do wrong things - that's the case for all the allegedly 'ambiguous characters' like Gollum, Boromir, Saruman, Denethor. Gollum knew that murder and theft was wrong but he still killed Déagol and became a thief. Boromir knew the Ring was evil and not his and that it was wrong to try to steal and intimidate your companions but he still did it. Saruman is an angelic being who knows god exists and that doing the things Sauron and Morgoth did is evil but he did it anyway. And Denethor very much knew that he wasn't a king, had no right to stand in the way of the rightful king, nor did he have the right to take his own life or try to murder his own son. As a Steward of the people of Gondor one could even make a case that he had no right to despair or abandon the people he had a duty to protect. The man pretty much deserted his post.

Neither of those people ever faced a complex moral dilemma in a complex world. It is all very simplistic.

16 hours ago, The Marquis de Leech said:

Frodo fails, of course, though no-one would condemn him for it.

Frodo doesn't fail at all. It is clear from the start, from the second chapter of the book, that he cannot and could not possibly destroy the Ruling Ring. If he cannot throw it into the fire in his own home there isn't any indication that he could do the same thing at another place, especially not a place where the power of the Ring would be much stronger.

The entire quest is done on the premise that things will resolve themselves at Mount Doom. Without a miracle/divine intervention there is no chance for victory.

16 hours ago, The Marquis de Leech said:

By the same token, Saruman himself is Tolkien's comment on consequentialist ethics, and the point is driven home that even Sauron himself did not start out Evil, nor does he actually see himself as such (Sauron wants order, of course). The Lord of the Rings is emphatically not Manichean.

Neither Saruman nor Sauron ever do anything that could be viewed as 'good'. They might see themselves as 'not evil' - although we never actually get their own honest opinions on their actions - but what they do clearly is wrong. They usurp power, lie, steal, murder, start wars without any cause but their own desire for dominance, etc.

That they weren't 'born evil' or evil when they were toddlers or preteens doesn't change the fact that the characters we meet and hear about in the novel are very much evil. And we don't really understand how and why they turned evil because nothing in the book even tries to explain how it might make sense to become a Dark Lord when you actually want to do good.

3 hours ago, C.T. Phipps said:

The choices of good vs. evil is pretty clear. However, it does have characters who struggle with the concepts or exist on a spectrum. The clearest example being Denethor who is a person who is clearly opposed to Sauron and a "good" person but (correctly) believes Gandalf intends to replace him and his line despite the fact the line of Isildur is one that failed. I'd argue that Tolkien actually grapples with the issue far more in THE HOBBIT books, ironically, where Thorin and company are pretty shady characters even in-universe.

Denethor isn't a good person. He is not as bad as others, of course, and he is *good* in the sense that he never joined Sauron directly, but he still abandoned his people and gave in to despair, trying to murder his son and killing himself. Which is marked quite clearly as a sin.

And of course Aragorn being the rightful king is something that is very much good in the novel. The restoration of the House of Elendil and two Dúnedain nations to glory is good without question. Insofar as Denethor deposes this divinely sanctioned agenda he is very much bad. Not as bad as Sauron but, in degree, comparable to him, I'd say, since the defining feature of a Dark Lord in the political sphere is the clinging to usurped power.

Denethor is just a steward. He rules for the king in his absence. He has no right to desire or execute royal authority as such.

8 minutes ago, Iskaral Pust said:

This points to a certain moral subjectivity rather than objectivity in Tolkien’s works, one that generally favors romantic, nostalgic conservatism.  Why should Gondor leap to acclaim a stranger after centuries?  Why should Laketown burn for the ambition of a stranger?  Dispossessed kings do not have an objective moral superiority but Tolkien’s narrative bestows one upon them — whether noble or tragic.  ASOIAF was more nuanced about this through Varys, although still couldn’t resist the romance of dispossessed lineages reclaiming their “birthright”.

Tolkien's works pretty much are all about the divine right of kings and such. Royal authority is only somewhat undermined if the king in question is a heretic or otherwise not in accord with the divine powers ruling the world - which is why Melkor's alleged kingship of Arda is false.

But even when you look at the Númenóreans even Ar-Pharazôn is never called a false king, or a king losing his right to the kingship because of his evil deeds. Also, in the end all the Númenórean people have to pay the price for Pharazôn's hubris because god decides to destroy their land and kill them all just for the deeds of the man they are obliged to obey.

The idea that a monarchy/restoration of the ancient dynasty is good in and of itself is never really questioned in Tolkien's works.

In ASoIaF you have various noble characters who are scions of this or that ancient bloodline thinking within the framework of the values and morals of such a society ... but overall, the narrator never tells us that the Starks or Targaryens are 'right' for wanting back their 'birthright', etc.

In LotR you cannot even make the case that Aragorn might not be the rightful king because signs and portents and prophecies and angelic beings tell us again and again that he is the rightful king.

[Iskaral Pust]

@Lord Varys I fully agree.  The moral subjectivity I mentioned is on the part of Tolkien.  He, god-like, dictates his own political preferences as the objective morality for his created world and then all characters must unambiguously conform to this moral stance — either virtuously or else corruptedly and/or cravenly — and the moral good is never questioned or even doubted.

Side debate: how does the immorality of Sauron, and even Saruman, compare to humans exploiting other species of animals?  Perhaps LOTR is really just a vegan parable.

In ASOIAF, several characters, especially Daenerys and Viserys, talk about their birthright.  But those are treated as individual opinions from an entitled worldview, not held as being morally unimpeachable or doubtless (or even unthinkable to doubt).

[C.T. Phipps]

2 hours ago, Iskaral Pust said:

This points to a certain moral subjectivity rather than objectivity in Tolkien’s works, one that generally favors romantic, nostalgic conservatism.  Why should Gondor leap to acclaim a stranger after centuries?  Why should Laketown burn for the ambition of a stranger?  Dispossessed kings do not have an objective moral superiority but Tolkien’s narrative bestows one upon them — whether noble or tragic.  ASOIAF was more nuanced about this through Varys, although still couldn’t resist the romance of dispossessed lineages reclaiming their “birthright”.

To be fair, I actually feel that the Hobbit is more deconstruction than straight example of this. Thorin reclaims his kingdom because some random archer slew the dragon and then sneaks in to reoccupy the Lonely Mountain in great defiance of anything heroic (refusing to reward the dragonslayer in the process). The motivation of everyone involved is also made clear to be greed as opposed to the more heroic movie take of wanting a homeland. Thorin also dies pretty much almost immediately after his "kingship."

I've long felt the Hobbit is a more subversive work than people give it credit for but people associate The Lord of the Rings so much with Tolkien [duh] that they tend to forget that he has a work that has a, "Wow, those old days were crazy" feel to it.

[butterweedstrover]

14 hours ago, polishgenius said:

 

As an aside, this is something that you did in the other topic too and it's perhaps contributing some of us to reading your tone more hostile or at least prescriptive than you make it- I know 'death of the author' is a thing and anyone can take whatever they want from a piece of fiction, but when when you talk about goals like this you've crossed from your own view on what they wrote to ascribing motivations to the author themself, contradictorily in this case because by your own admission their own work isn't aiming towards those goals.   

How? I am not implying the intent of the author, I am implying the intent of the narrative, characters, and themes. 

In the case of the MCU, the narrative, characters, and themes reinforce this idea of a superhero fantasy, the construction of a myth that overcomes every trial and tribulation. I don't find Thanos' character arc consistent with the rest of the series. 

[butterweedstrover]

19 hours ago, The Marquis de Leech said:

I think you are implicitly assuming that there is no depth to Objective Morality because it is Objective. Which rather boggles the mind.

I don't believe I said that. Being as I don't argue LOTR should be morally ambiguous.  

Objective Morality can be deep or interesting. I find Stoicism to be interesting, and Existentialism. Both have some objective morality of what is good and what is evil. 'The Stranger' by Albert Camus (until the very end) had something of an objective morality that I found interesting. 

LOTR (my interpretation though I could be wrong) doesn't seem to focus on why its morality is right. The characters' triumph does not signify the morality of their good, the morality of good is already taken for granted. 

Evil is also taken for granted. Greed, vanity, bloodlust, are all assumed evil from the outset.  

 

[Larry of the Lawn]

Doesn't existentialism mostly reject objective morality? Argues that morality is basically personal preferences?

[butterweedstrover]

27 minutes ago, larrytheimp said:

Doesn't existentialism mostly reject objective morality? Argues that morality is basically personal preferences?

That is in of itself an objective morality. 

How is authenticity anymore vague than piety? 

[Clueless Northman]

And with Stoicism, nobody is actually evil, it's only people who are ignorant of what the objective good is who do evil basically by mistake.

 

5 hours ago, Lord Varys said:

Frodo doesn't fail at all. It is clear from the start, from the second chapter of the book, that he cannot and could not possibly destroy the Ruling Ring. If he cannot throw it into the fire in his own home there isn't any indication that he could do the same thing at another place, especially not a place where the power of the Ring would be much stronger. The entire quest is done on the premise that things will resolve themselves at Mount Doom. Without a miracle/divine intervention there is no chance for victory.

Frodo still fails, because he couldn't achieve what he hoped to do. Tolkien says so himself - not in LOTR of course but in his Letters -, and acknowledges that basically no one could have willingly cast the Ring into the fire.

 

5 hours ago, Lord Varys said:

Neither Saruman nor Sauron ever do anything that could be viewed as 'good'. They might see themselves as 'not evil' - although we never actually get their own honest opinions on their actions - but what they do clearly is wrong. They usurp power, lie, steal, murder, start wars without any cause but their own desire for dominance, etc. That they weren't 'born evil' or evil when they were toddlers or preteens doesn't change the fact that the characters we meet and hear about in the novel are very much evil. And we don't really understand how and why they turned evil because nothing in the book even tries to explain how it might make sense to become a Dark Lord when you actually want to do good.

Tolkien is quite clear, in the Silmarillion and possibly HOME or Letters, that Sauron was scared shitless after the Valar destroyed Morgoth, and he tried to be a good boy for a time, trying to restore Arda and fix things. Though, being Sauron and with his past as Morgoth's lackey, soon enough his ways of fixing things were "It would be easier if I were dictator", and after a few centuries, he was back to his old ways. As for Saruman, none of his actions in LOTR are good, but of course he didn't begin to be evil when coming to Middle-Earth; it was centuries of trying to find clever ways of beating Sauron and being the head of the White Council that warped him.

Now, about turning evil, and moral complexity, we have Galadriel, who clearl sees all the potential of the Ring and dreams herself as Queen of Arda, then realizes how badly this would end and soon rejects that idea. There's also Gandalf who tells Frodo that he can't take the Ring and it has to be destroyed, because the Ring would let him do great might deeds, he might cast Sauron down, but then, he would be a more terrible Dark Lord because he would use the Ring to do what he thinks is good (like Sauron actually), and would then make Good look Evil, because it would be forced down everyone's throat by an invincible allmighty Lord of Middle-Earth.

[butterweedstrover]

11 minutes ago, Clueless Northman said:

And with Stoicism, nobody is actually evil, it's only people who are ignorant of what the objective good is who do evil basically by mistake.

 

Morality is not just for determining the identity of a single person. It is for determining right behavior from wrong behavior.  

Stoics believe courage is a right behavior, vanity is bad behavior for example.  

Maybe no one is evil, but there is wrong behaviors and right behaviors to follow. 

[C.T. Phipps]

There's an interesting issue that Sauron, despite being a literal fallen angel and the Second Dark Lord, fundamentally misunderstands the nature of his master and is a lesser entity in terms of evil. Indeed, Saruman is the same to Sauron with him being a lesser evil as well. Sauron wishes to bring order to Middle Earth and keep it properly awesome versus fading and changing. This despite the fact that Morgoth is an omnicidal spite-fillled lunatic who wishes to destroy everything everywhere.

This despite the fact that Sauron has the men under his command worship Morgoth as a god.

Saruman has similar ambitions to Sauron but is not as awful as him.

There's a long long road from Morgoth.

[Lord Varys]

5 hours ago, C.T. Phipps said:

I've long felt the Hobbit is a more subversive work than people give it credit for but people associate The Lord of the Rings so much with Tolkien [duh] that they tend to forget that he has a work that has a, "Wow, those old days were crazy" feel to it.

That is true. The Hobbit is more subversive and more fun than the 'grown-up stuff' because it doesn't take itself too seriously and the point of it is to subvert certain ideas and concepts rather than actually using them.

1 hour ago, Clueless Northman said:

Frodo still fails, because he couldn't achieve what he hoped to do. Tolkien says so himself - not in LOTR of course but in his Letters -, and acknowledges that basically no one could have willingly cast the Ring into the fire.

He doesn't fail on a moral level. Nobody could really expect him to destroy the Ring. It was an impossible task. If I fail to fly I've not failed in a moral sense ... unlike, say, if I say I want to pass my exams or learn how to drive a car.

1 hour ago, Clueless Northman said:

Tolkien is quite clear, in the Silmarillion and possibly HOME or Letters, that Sauron was scared shitless after the Valar destroyed Morgoth, and he tried to be a good boy for a time, trying to restore Arda and fix things. Though, being Sauron and with his past as Morgoth's lackey, soon enough his ways of fixing things were "It would be easier if I were dictator", and after a few centuries, he was back to his old ways. As for Saruman, none of his actions in LOTR are good, but of course he didn't begin to be evil when coming to Middle-Earth; it was centuries of trying to find clever ways of beating Sauron and being the head of the White Council that warped him.

Most of what Tolkien tells us about Sauron are speculations on his part. He doesn't allow him to speak and explain himself properly as a character in his own works. In that sense you have to take all that speculation with a grain of salt.

That said - yes, we do know how Sauron set himself up as the new Dark Lord after the First Age and we also do have reason to believe he had different motives and goals than Melkor-Morgoth ... but we still have no idea how the angelic being Sauron - the Maia who once served Aule - ended up joining Melkor in the ancient days. What rationale drove him to abandon Aule for Melkor in the first place?

We have no clue about any of that. And that is the root of evil for Sauron.

But even for his second fall we really have no in-depth explanation. Why did he feel the need to betray Celebrimbor and forge a master ring to rule them all? Why couldn't he trust his fellow ring-smith?

57 minutes ago, C.T. Phipps said:

There's an interesting issue that Sauron, despite being a literal fallen angel and the Second Dark Lord, fundamentally misunderstands the nature of his master and is a lesser entity in terms of evil. Indeed, Saruman is the same to Sauron with him being a lesser evil as well. Sauron wishes to bring order to Middle Earth and keep it properly awesome versus fading and changing. This despite the fact that Morgoth is an omnicidal spite-fillled lunatic who wishes to destroy everything everywhere.

This despite the fact that Sauron has the men under his command worship Morgoth as a god.

Saruman has similar ambitions to Sauron but is not as awful as him.

There's a long long road from Morgoth.

I think there is a weird discrepancy in Tolkien's own musings about Sauron. Sauron was part of Melkor-Morgoth's innermost circle since the very beginning and he completely emulated Morgoth later on. Tolkien even describes Sauron as a kind of little Morgoth, a shadow who followed him down into the void.

Sauron may very well have not shared whatever ultimate nihilistic desires Melkor had - not that they are ever really elaborated on, either, aside from Melkor's futile attempts to ruin Eru's creation - but in practice there seems to be no difference between the day-to-day 'dark lording' of Sauron and that of Morgoth.

If whatever philosophical differences there were between Sauron and Morgoth had any impact on Sauron's actions then we would be able to see real differences in the way they did things.

[The Marquis de Leech]

8 hours ago, Iskaral Pust said:

This points to a certain moral subjectivity rather than objectivity in Tolkien’s works, one that generally favors romantic, nostalgic conservatism.  Why should Gondor leap to acclaim a stranger after centuries?  Why should Laketown burn for the ambition of a stranger?  Dispossessed kings do not have an objective moral superiority but Tolkien’s narrative bestows one upon them — whether noble or tragic.  ASOIAF was more nuanced about this through Varys, although still couldn’t resist the romance of dispossessed lineages reclaiming their “birthright”.

Gondor acclaimed a stranger because he'd saved their collective arse in battle (and more cynically because Denethor had taken himself out, and Gandalf had organised a coup amid the power vacuum). What do you think would have happened if 20-year old Aragorn had turned up to the gates of Minas Tirith,demanding the throne?

Lake Town's view of Thorin is both overly cynical ("he's faking it"), and overly naive ("The rivers shall run with gold!"). In reality, Thorn is not faking it, but no amount of being the Rightful King will change anything so long as the dragon still sits on the hoard.

(Incidentally, Tolkien's Farmer Giles of Ham is a look at a Rightful King who has forgotten the foundations of his authority, and becomes the villain).  

[JGP]

54 minutes ago, Lord Varys said:

Most of what Tolkien tells us about Sauron are speculations on his part. He doesn't allow him to speak and explain himself properly as a character in his own works. In that sense you have to take all that speculation with a grain of salt.

I read this, and thought about it, and all I can think is how horrifyingly thoughtless this statement is.
 

There is absolutely no one within a thousand leagues more able to expound upon quintessential Sauron than Tolkien. 
 

Grain of salt? Like fuck out of here lol

[The Marquis de Leech]

8 hours ago, Lord Varys said:

There are pretty much no moral dilemmas in LotR because it is quite clear what is the right thing to do, always.

There certainly are characters who do wrong things but they all know what the right thing is and decide to do wrong things - that's the case for all the allegedly 'ambiguous characters' like Gollum, Boromir, Saruman, Denethor. Gollum knew that murder and theft was wrong but he still killed Déagol and became a thief. Boromir knew the Ring was evil and not his and that it was wrong to try to steal and intimidate your companions but he still did it. Saruman is an angelic being who knows god exists and that doing the things Sauron and Morgoth did is evil but he did it anyway. And Denethor very much knew that he wasn't a king, had no right to stand in the way of the rightful king, nor did he have the right to take his own life or try to murder his own son. As a Steward of the people of Gondor one could even make a case that he had no right to despair or abandon the people he had a duty to protect. The man pretty much deserted his post.

Neither of those people ever faced a complex moral dilemma in a complex world. It is all very simplistic.

Boromir knew the Ring was evil, but genuinely thought that the Ends Justify the Means, specifically that using the Ring would perform the Good of saving his homeland from Sauron. It's the same reasoning that people use to justify the use of the Atomic Bomb against Japan. Boromir is only wrong because we're reading a text written by a devout Catholic.

Denethor knew he wasn't King. He just (arguably correctly) thought that the Heir of Isildur had no claim to Gondor, based off precedent. He also (not without reason) thought that Gondor was doomed... again, his fault being that he does not Believe. Denethor is arguably what happens if you put an intelligent, modern politician into that sort of setting... it's wrong in the context of Tolkien's Objective Morality, but entirely understandable, especially if you don't subscribe to that form of morality.