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Originally Posted by davem
Yes - as I acknowledged before, the Orcs behave like Orcs - they do nasty things to the good guys, but the good guys are never Orkish. The ugliness of a medieval battle rarely enters the pages of Tolkien. & when it does, it is surrounded with a golden poetic glow:
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I get your point and agree partially too (though I don't agree that an author should be criticised for being poetic). It's true that we never get any direct descriptions of the ugly deeds of the good guys but that they occur nonetheless is easy to perceive. Here's another quote from
the Silmarillion regarding the Third Battle:
Quote:
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...they defeated the servants of Morgoth, and pursuing them across Ard-Galen destroyed them utterly, to the least and last, within sight of Angband's gates.
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They destroyed them to 'the least and last'... That must have been a brutal slaughter of the Orcs and within sight of Angband's gates too, for all their mates to watch. And don't tell me that they didn't plea for mercy towards the end, when the battle already was lost and they were routed by the vicious Noldor. Nevertheless, they were slaughtered without mercy, every single one of them. Was that really necessary?