Quote:
Originally posted by Bethberry:
I suppose you have been influenced by some of the other threads which suggest that readers need not concur with the author?
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Very astute, I think. I suppose one could see a World War Two analogy within "The Lord of the Rings," but Tolkien himself vehemently denied this. Whether it's there or not, any epic war could correlate to the War of the Ring. Certainly the Nazis no longer have world power as they did when Tolkien wrote his masterpiece. This does not make the applicability of this correlation uninformative, or valueless. One can always learn something about one by knowing something of the other. There is probably as much danger in "ultimate reader interpretation" as there is in "ultimate authorial authority."
Let us set aside the
Lord of the Bible thread from this other thread for the moment.
Certainly the battles, and the battle techniques used were as close to a variety of battle techniques actually used in Medieval times. While this a "Books" thread, I think this is something Peter Jackson did quite well in the movie. The "travelling" army, the orcs of Mordor, used catapults, while the entrenched army (Gondor) used trebuchets. This was very telling about Medieval warfare, I think. not that an army could not construct a trebuchet on-site if they needed to, but that catapults were probably more reliable when carted a long distance. I'm no expert, but I would think this is as close to historical accuracy as you can truly find. The overall story cannot be accurately correlated to any historical war that I can think of. Of course, I don't look for it. It is it's own story set in its own world.