(December 2, 2014 at 3:04 pm)Chuck Wrote:(December 2, 2014 at 2:34 pm)Parkers Tan Wrote: If a balrog was climbing up out of a deep chasm in order to kill your friends, would you stand at the bridge with your staff and order your friends to flee, knowing that the chains of the balrog's flail will surely drag you to your doom?
Yeah, it really is about that silly.
But we all know "doom" is just there to both enable us to claim the ultimate self sacrifice, and still to come back as gandolf the white to gloat over the downfall of sauron.
That's okay for a fantasy novel. A real system of morality would never be stoop to that kind of childish disingenuous moral double dealing, would it now.
Indeed. That's why I enjoy the book as a good read, and avoid reading it as allegory, even though Gandalf and Frodo are clearly Christ-figures.
Tolkien was a polytheist ... who knew?
