Edelaith wrote:I think Lord Foul has a poor opinion of himself because he is always talking about how great he is, and how stupid everyone else. If he is so intelligent and everyone else is so idiotic, there is no need to endlessly say so, for the facts would speak for themselves. Yet Foul persists, which indicates to me that he has another motive.
Someone once told me that if you argue your case by justifications and rationalizations, that you actually weaken the case you are trying to make. Foul tries to endlessly justify and rationalize why he is so superior and everyone else is so inferior. If he really felt so good about himself, why does he feel the need to endlessly talk about it?
You're missing an important distinction here, I think:
If you argue a case by justifications and rationalizations, you weaken
your argument; the actual
case may still be irrefutable. If someone tries to prove by a completely idiotic argument that two and two make four, that doesn't
disprove that two and two make four; it just demonstrates that the person arguing is an idiot.
Further, I would say that Foul does not 'endlessly talk about' his own superiority. He talks a great deal about the folly and weakness of his enemies, but every word is calculated for the effect it will have on his hearers. He wants to induce despair in them, and trick them into bad strategic choices by focusing their attention on intractable problems instead of possible solutions.
In any case, all this talk about people puffing themselves up to compensate for a deep-seated inferiority complex is just bad pop psychology. In clinical psychology nowadays, they no longer use 'complex' as a diagnostic term, and the idea of overcompensation has been dethroned from the central position to which some of the early Freudians elevated it. Many people believe (they even teach it in education programs at universities) that school bullies are merely acting out because they have low self-esteem. Current research shows exactly the opposite: they are acting out because they have absurdly exaggerated self-esteem, and no esteem for anyone else. If you try to cure a bully by feeding his self-esteem, you will only validate his behaviour and make an even bigger bully out of him. I would maintain that Lord Foul is that kind of bully.
Unfortunately, in the First Chronicles, and particularly in LFB, SRD had not yet fully mastered his art. At times he followed some of the sillier traditions of the genre (the kind that Clute & Grant call 'maggots'), including the tradition that the arch-villain shall explain his brilliant plot by gloating over the helpless hero. A lot of Foul's dialogue in LFB reminds me of the villain in a James Bond movie. So I don't think you can tell anything useful about Foul's psyche from those early scenes. They just won't bear the weight of that kind of serious analysis.
The Foul of
Runes is much better drawn; he has by now been fully established as a spirit who speaks only to mislead and manipulate, whose 'snares are ever beset with other snares', and if he talks more than he once did, it is because (like Saruman after Gandalf broke his staff) he has no weapon left but his voice.
I don't think the evidence points to any kind of poor self-image on Foul's part at all.
Without the Quest, our lives will be wasted.
). I almost wonder if one of his torments is boredom - after all, he's been imprisoned for the best part of 10000 years - and as such he was glad to see an old opponent return.
