Lord of the Rings | Characters
Tolkien has, on occasion, been criticized by mainstream literary critics for simplistic and stereotypical characterization and, when compared to the detailed characters of Henry James or Faulkner, his Gandalf and Aragorn do come across as thin. Such criticism, however, is largely a matter of condemning an apple for not being an orange. When examining Tolkien's use of character development, his technique should be compared not to that of the masters of the realistic tradition, but rather to that of the writers of the romance and epic, both medieval and modern. Within this context,...
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