
Originally Posted by
Radhruin_EU
And I, personally, think that's facile as it's far too simplistic. Redemption should take a lot more than "oh all right then" (which is all you're offering here, no better than an excuse) and certainly in Tolkien generally some sins are so grievous that they can only be redeemed in death (as with Boromir's heroic last stand, for example, which paid for what he'd done earlier). Again, the Corsairs were bad people and Tolkien treats them as such - not just misled or dragged into it against their will (so not like that nameless Haradrim soldier who Sam sees lying dead, symbolising all the other countless victims of Sauron's malice, cruelty and warmongering) but actually bad which of course they are, given what they do for a living. They traffic in human suffering for profit. In the context of a culture that'd been influenced by Sauron for a very long time indeed it should be no surprise that that'd have been normalised, but you're busily trying to whitewash that out.
I'd like to see some source for those remarks. (That come on a bit hostile, what I mean is that I had only been led to believe that the corsairs and Umbar as a whole were only really spoken about in passing by Tolkien himself and no great detail was ever revealed)
Edit: Some googling and doing a wordsearch in the books doesn't really bring up any sort of black and whiteness that you're suggesting here but if you have a super secret source of corsair facts, I'd be happy to read it. The problem is that you've backed yourself into a corner where you're stuck trying to defend your argument that every single corsair, from the baby just born to the oldest amongst them is 100% evil and committed to the corsair way and this simply isn't true for any other faction or people in LOTR save for maybe the orcs and goblins, who were created/bred that way. Why would it be true for corsairs? It sounds like you just want something other than corsair.
Last edited by Atonu; Feb 11 2023 at 03:56 PM.
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