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Originally Posted by Nogrod
I would here vote for a more "down to earth" Tolkien, who saw the inevitableness of the advances of technologies and the requirement of sacrifices in front of them - that could actually bring forth good things, but quite a loss as well, f.ex. as a disappearance of "magic" with it. It's kind of a basic thing: when things change, they will be different: you lose something and you acquire something. And with a certain personality, you just take the new good things as given, and just make a slight sigh to the remembrance of the things past.
So should we be happy with the new things (peace, stability, welfare etc.) or sigh for the lost (action, heroism, virtues, honour etc.)? That's a question we could put to ourselves too....
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There seems, however, in Tolkien's Letters and Ring story, a sense of loss of something very good and beautiful, and the onset of something qualitatively inferior, and less good.
I see your point,
Raynor, that Galadriel is trying to preserve a reality, in Lorien, that is the ideal and original reality, as expressed in Valinor. However, I see
davem's point as well, that such an endeavor is vain in Middle Earth, and as such, not only doomed to fail (as she well knows .... "the long defeat" ....), but a mis-use; a technological effort, in as much as it is against the state of things. So even though the "state of things" in Middle Earth is cursed by Melkor's taint, it is nevertheless the way things are, and to try to stop them is to part from wisdom. Galadriel, as powerful as she was, was able to achieve the thing for a longer period of time, but only because Sauron's Ring still existed. Does that not clarify the futility of Galadriel's Art in the case of Lorien ... that it was based upon the existence of the One Ring to rule them all, and in the darkness bind them?