- Joined
- Aug 3, 2021
Gollum's death is also symbolic of the self defeating and ultimately empty nature of evil. Gollum's death is because he cannot let go of the ring, he's too taken by it, and because of this he unintentionally gets himself and the ring destroyed. It very much makes me think of Romans 8:28, "And we know in all things God works fort the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose". Because Bilbo showed mercy on Gollum way back in the Hobbit, Eru Iluvatar is able to use Gollum's wicked obsession to deal the final blow to Sauron.And I do think Robert is being disingenuous here. Not that I think Robert knows much about Tolkien and his work besides the movies and wikipedia, but that the Lord of the Rings is pretty much self evident about the goodness of it's heroes triumphing over the forces of evil, and Gollum's death is the poetic irony that seals Sauron's fate, clearly it's not meant to be taken in any sort of grayscale moral understanding.
If anyone visited videos on the Rings of Power before it came out, there were a lot of people copy pastaing a Tolkien quote, about how evil does not have the capacity to create, but only to corrupt what is good. It takes a lot from St. Augustine's belief that evil didn't exist in an ontological way, but was simply a deprivation of good. For example, darkness doesn't exist as something tangible, it only exists as an absence of light, and he thought evil worked in the same way. You can also see this with the Wring wraiths who literally are disappearing into the ghostly world because the ring has stretched their existence so thin.