[Morthoron]

I think villainy has taken a turn for the...ummm...worse, or perhaps the world has. Tolkien drew his images of evil from another time, from his Catholic roots and from other ancient presentations of evil, whether Grendel in Beowulf or Lucifer the Fallen, himself.

When Tolkien stated his story was not allegorical to WWII, he meant it. There really isn't a hint of Hitler or Stalin in Sauron, is there? In both Sauron and Morgoth before him, evil was omnipresent and preternatural, the ancient demons made manifest on earth; hence Sauron is seen only as the Great Eye, wishing to rule the world, but not truly part of it. Tolkien did not foray far into the 4th Age, the Age of Man, and his one attempt he aborted rather quickly. Why? Perhaps because Man is far more horrific an evil than any demigod, and Tolkien's utter disdain for the modern, whether it be for automobiles or great machines of destruction (made by the Orcs, you know), is clearly delineated in his work.

Tolkien's conception of the world was clearly from another era -- Victorian morally and Anglo-Saxon linguistically. He could no more write a modern novel than William Faulkner could write sunny children's prose. Perhaps we too, in embracing Middle-earth, yearn for such simplicity, where evil is monolithic and horrible, yes, but it is identifiable as such. But the modern world is fragmented and perhaps going through the last throes of dementia. Evil has become synonymous with insanity, and a thousand times a thousand shards of evil prick us everyday. There is no rhyme or reason to evil, and though a battalion of experts prattle their platitudes on CNN and MSNBC, no one really can make sense of it. People rap themselves in bombs and blow themselves up in crowded buses, children go to school with automatic rifles and slaughter their schoolmates, and despite mounting evidence to the contrary, governments cynically allow the destruction of the environment so that the corporate coffers of their patrons swell even as the polar ice caps shrink.

It is as Charles Manson said when he opined perceptively, "You know, a long time ago being crazy meant something. Nowadays, everybody's crazy." Evil aint what it used to be.