I’ve had to work with a bunch of Turins. Watching such highly skilled, highly motivated people can be inspiring when you can detach yourself from it. The reality is much different. You’re right in the sense that one might feel pity when some of them self-destruct. Others are, to put it nicely, not easy to deal with. It tempers one’s sense of pity. I think there’s a direct correlation between their total hubris and the amount of pity you can feel. Pride goeth before the fall, and the schadenfreude rate increases correspondingly with the pride.

PS, are you handy with MatLab? I’ve got this project I need to work on. . . .

One could use Turin Turambar as the example of the Middle Earth hero who didn’t pay attention to the warnings of others, not to mention his own conscience & upbringing. However, Turin acts not only from pride, but from what he considers his proper sense of loyalty & duty.

So far you could be talking about the SS or the 9/11 hijackers… If my sense of loyalty and duty causes me to inflict great evil on others (and myself), am I somehow absolved?

The tragedy of Turin is that he ultimately can’t master Doom, because he carries that Doom inside himself.

Here is where I see it differently. He never lost his free will, and could, at any point, have avoided doing Morgoth’s bidding. IMO, to the extent he carried anything malign within himself, it was his rashness, pride and stubbornness, not some fatalistic “Doom”.

As Hurin himself correctly observes in their conversation, Morgoth is not unchallenged, nor is he the mightiest power in Middle Earth. It was Turin’s choice to face Morgoth’s “cloud of Doom” without any allies - many tried to help him, but he scorned them all.

We end up being drawn to Turin because of his blown opportunities for success, not in spite of them. It’s easy to understand his failings, and to remember that properly becoming the hero (according to Tolkien’s standard), is more than just playing the part.

I didn’t feel drawn to Turin at all. I pitied him as I might pity any self-destructive person, but I see him as a guy whose stupidity and arrogance caused a lot of unnecessary grief to a lot innocent people. Turin could be a poster-child for the aphorism: “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.”

And in fact, like many self-destructive personalities in the real world, he seems to have learned nothing in the end - he dies blaming everyone but himself for his misfortunes, and cursing the people who had bent over backwards to try to save him from himself.

One could use Turin Turambar as the example of the Middle Earth hero who didn’t pay attention to the warnings of others, not to mention his own conscience & upbringing. However, Turin acts not only from pride, but from what he considers his proper sense of loyalty & duty. The tragedy of Turin is that he ultimately can’t master Doom, because he carries that Doom inside himself. Still, TCOH is a more inspiring saga, tragic though it may be, than the Volsungs portion of The Rings Cycle, with its various deeds & misdeeds which echo in the Silmarillion. The same could be said for the various Norse sagas where the fierce heroes slay and rule in bleak pagan existentialism before valiantly snuffing it & being placed on the pyre. We end up being drawn to Turin because of his blown opportunities for success, not in spite of them. It’s easy to understand his failings, and to remember that properly becoming the hero (according to Tolkien’s standard), is more than just playing the part.

I am curious to see how the story tells itself, too. The TCOH is (to me anyway) some of Tolkien’s best writing. He puts a lot of effort into describing the characters and their actions & reactions. It will be interesting to see how Christopher reconciles the Silmrillion text with the Unfinished Tales additions to create a single integrated narrative.

Ummm, they’re books about hobbits and elves. How much consequence can we be talking about?

Dave, I think we’re being disparaged.

Yeah, next time we discuss such matters, we’d better do it in Elvish. I mean, we don’t want to look like geeks or anything… :-)

Having finished the book, I’m afraid I didn’t find too much uplifting about it. I disagree about Turin being an innocent victim of fate. If you want to talk about hubris, the guy had it in spades.

Many of the bad guys in Tolkien’s work fall because they refuse to acknowledge or accept the natural limitations of their situation or their selves, and are taken over by pride. Melkor being the first, but not the last, of course.

Although Turin’s pride didn’t lead him to try dominating others like Melkor, Sauron, Saruman, etc (although he usually succeeded in doing so anyway…) he was unable to master himself, which in Tolkien’s universe is pretty much guaranteed to bring woe and eventually destruction. And the same flaw afflicted his mother and sister.

Still, does that mean he truly failed in the end, and was defeated? In TCOH Turin learns his duty as a child to live nobly, do good to others to earn their respect & love, and to always fight for the Right (like White’s Knights of the Round Table) against the Enemy whose only delight is the misery of others. As an adult he keeps to those values, and if he ultimately fails each time, he is still willing-up-to a point- to continue. Being a hero means more than a Sword of Kings and a cool title.

Was it worth it? Turin did many mighty deeds in his life. Unlike most of Tolkien’s heroes, he didn’t even get to see other people benefit from any of his deeds, let alone get any lasting personal pleasure from them. Still, he did his best, and if he failed, it was because he dared to do more than the average Man or Elf of his time.

Timmer, I don’t think a discussion of how one of our favorite authors views the nature of the individual is entirely inconsequential. :)