Reply #20: even Gandalf slipped up sometimes ...

[Lisa]

Tolkien must have been tempted to write about a perfect character (after all, Gandalf isn't strictly human), but he realized that it makes the story a lot less interesting. (Eddison's heroes tend to be so much larger than life that it's hard to identify with them, and they don't seem to have been transformed at all by the end of the book.)

Personally, I like the 20th-century fantasies that give even the heroic characters some recognizable flaws. It gives them somewhere to go, in terms of story and character development -- for example, Taran in Lloyd Alexander's books. Evidently, Dumbledore learned and changed during his life -- this happens to all of us, in both good and bad ways.

One of my favorite books is Carol Kendall's "The Whisper of Glocken" -- she deliberately starts with an assortment of hard-to-like people, who are surprised and dismayed when they find out that the much-idolized heroes they've admired from afar are incompetent and annoying as they are themselves! And yet both groups somehow manage to accomplish brave feats.