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Originally Posted by davem
Tolkien wouldn't have created such a personification of evil, because he had seen real evil on the Somme, & knew that it's really cowardly, self obsessed & cruel.
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Quote:
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Originally Posted by davem
It was hell & hell is suffused with the presence of evil. there was something'evil' in all that waste, a good part of a whole generation thrown away, the soldiers themselves throwing their own lives away. Some thing more than insanity was going on there, & I don't know what else to call it but 'evil' - not evil individuals, but evil nonetheless.
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In the first quote, you seem to be talking about evil with a face, or evil personified, as you said. In the second, you are talking about a nameless, faceless evil, that appears like the mist. I agree with you that there was wrongness and evil in World War I (and II, and all the others) but it was not the
personified evil, like Morgoth and Sauron, found in Tolkien's books. Both forms of evil that you discussed appears in Tolkien's books. The second form may well have come from Tolkien's war experiences- I can't imagine anyone going through that and not being affected by it- but where does he get the idea for the Morgoth-and-Sauron type of evil? Isn't it just as stereotypical as Pullman's Lord Asriel, and the Bell-villain? Is there this kind of evil in the
world?