Re: CHAT: JRRT

John Cowan wrote:

> And Rosta scripsit:
>>(IMHO, with the exception of the Hobbitagonists, Tolkien's characters
>>tended to have a fractal dimension closer to 2 than 3, admittedly in
>>large part because there were just so darn many of them.)
>
>
> Also because many of them are non-human, and (as Lewis said) wear their
> insides on their outside.  When you know that someone is a Dwarf, you
> already know quite a bit about them.
>
> OTOH, what you know may constitute a stereotype: we don't get the Dwarvish
> view of Dwarves, after all.
That ís a potential danger of writing about non-human characters -- you
need to make their non-human traits clear without seeming to stereotype
them. This is easier if you have a whole cast of non-human characters to
deal with, like Wendy and Richard Pini's elves (their trolls seem more
stereotyped, but that might just be a consequence of the fact that the
focus in the stories is more on the elves), but when you've essentially
got one character representing a whole species (like Gimli or Treebeard
in LotR), it's hard not to think in terms of stereotypes.