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Originally Posted by davem
But were the broken, hacked up bodies actually there?Did people actualy DIE, or did they just get nicely DEAD.
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There's no reason to assume some kind of magic prevented the mutilation of bodies slain with the cruel weapons of the age. Therefore, that death happened in a real way seems patent enough, and Tolkien's refrainment is perhaps to do with this presumption.
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So, the 'truth' about how people die in battle, what human beings do to each other on the field, is absent. Should it be? Its an omission, but do we lose or gain by that omission? To repeat my earlier point:
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Yes, it should be absent. In part because what is happening in Middle-earth is largely NOT what "human beings do to each other," but rather what humans and orcs do to each other. Orcs are manifestly evil, intended to be strictly unsympathetic. One might argue that what orcs do to humans (or more broadly what any warring humanoids do to one another) might be relevant. But really, it seems pretty clear that Tolkien's purpose was decidedly not to illuminate these grisly truths, for those reasons you have yourself beaten to death. Perhaps one reason that Tolkien refuses to embrace an allegorical reading of his story is exactly your point: any correlation of LotR's conflicts to the wars of the 20th century would be dishonest and dehumanizing.