[davem]

Originally Posted by Bêthberry

But he did acknowledge it, just not where you want it. That's what his Homecoming of Bryhtnoth is about, as you have ably stated.

I'd see HoB differently, & this is why I brought it up. Tida, the old man, specifically attacks Totta's (the young poet) romantic/heroic take on warfare. Tida mocks Totta's idealism, telling him that if he is unfortunate enough to find himself in a battle he will realise that its not like the poems & songs he makes so much of. This conversation takes place while the two search for their fallen lord's body, picking their way through the corpses at night, while the 'masterless men' rob the dead. This is Tolkien himself speaking through the old warrior of the harsh reality of war, stating in no uncertain terms that he is wrong to view war as the playground of heroes. That the battlefield is a place where people get cut down, die painfully, & their corpses are left to scavengers.

Can we see this as in anyway Tolkien's response to certain aspects of his own work? I think so - in the same way as CoH can be seen almost as the inverted image of LotR. Its too simplistic to claim that Tolkien was seeking in his fiction to escape his own experiences - which is why (at the risk of repeating myself!) I have kept on rejecting that overly simplistic explanation. He gave us a novel, in LotR, in which warfare is reduced to heroic fantasy, but he knows very well (& tells us very clearly in HoB/CoH) that its not like that. In some of his works he is Totta, in others, he is Tida. Therefore, because he doesn't adopt a single approach to warfare in all his works its valid to ask why in LotR he glamourises war.

Originally Posted by Hookbill

Here, I fear, we must agree to disagree. Without the knowledge of characters the section loses much of its effect.

Well, the point is Wiseman & the wounded soldier were real people. We may not know even the soldier's name, but what we do know is that he was once a baby in his mother's arms, that he ran around & played with other children, that he grew up to manhood, joined the army & ended as we saw. The horror of his fate, so graphically (but not gratuitously) described brings home the true horror of his fate. He was a man like us, & his fate could be ours, or our children's.