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Originally Posted by davem

Because Tolkien never mentions anything of the sort. One might as well offer up the explanation that Earedel hovered invisibly over the battlefields & teleported the corpses off the field. Or that lots of carnivorous butterflies alighted on the bodies & ate them.

Please...

What you're doing, it seems to me, is inventing an 'explanation' for which there's no textual support in order to avoid the difficulties in the story.

It's very possible that I just like having a good discussion with you.

Anyway, to put you in the dock for a moment:

• Do you affirm or deny that there is textual support that someone of Númenórean descent could stop living at a self-determined moment, though we may not know the mechanism?

• Do you affirm or deny that there is textual support for the existence of Númenórean 'blood' in the soldier population of Gondor at the end of the Third Age, regardless of the amount?

• Do you affirm or deny that there is textual support that makes my supposition completely impossible (i.e. a direct and clear statement to the fact that men with Númenórean blood could not chose the moment of their deaths)?

However much my paranoia makes me believe in carnivorous butterflies, there is no textual support, as you indicate, for the same. I would believe that there are insects in Middle Earth, as we see examples of the midges and neekerbreekers and having poor Grima name 'Worm.' Surely some type of bug - so close to Mordor - would attack the wounds and flesh of the dying on the battlefield. But butterflies? I'd believe locusts or spiders or ants or beetles, as they 'eat' things whereas butterflies are nectar drinkers (or whatever the technical term is).

The simplest explanation is that Tolkien decided not to deal with the actual, unpleasant realities of warfare (& other things) because he didn't want such things in his story. The question is whether he was justified in doing that?

Okay, so I think that this is a more fair and understandable question. What justice do you seek from his writings? Again, if we are including 'what really happens,' we don't have to stop at the battlefield. Is this an issue with fantasy, or with writing a whole? How would the story change if we have to 'real up' every scene? Where did Bilbo store his butter? How did he keep Bag End so dry...dry enough to store books? Etc.

And further, if Tolkien is justified in doing that, because he is 'subcreating' a secondary world, how can one condemn, say, Philip Pullman for presenting us with a God who is a senile old fake, or any writer creating a secondary world in which black people are sub-human, rape is fun for all concerned, or mass murder of jews is a moral act?

I'm sure that it's all in the head of the reader. If the writer can create something plausible that a reader can then accept; well, there you would have it.

If you ever get the chance, speaking of bugs, read, "Hellstrom's Hive" by Frank Herbert. Tell me that by the end you're not rooting for the insect humans over our current society. Why? Because the writer set up a scenario that me as the reader could accept as plausible. Now, when I put the book down, I'm not looking forward to becoming a bug-like species, but when in the book, I can see it.

OK - I've taken extreme examples there, but that's what it comes down to - does the fantasy genre permit any degree of 'invention' on a writer's part? I'm fairly sure that many who would defend Tolkien's right to omit the 'unpleasant' realities of death in battle in Middle-earth, would condemn Pullman's depiction of God - not simply as 'offensive' but also as untrue....

Readers' experiences with materials may vary.

Because, we either say that fantasy as a genre allows total freedom to a writer to depict any kind of world they wish & we, as readers, must not question that right, or we accept that we do have a right to question the choices a writer of fantasy makes, the omissions & inclusions.

Writers can do whatever they like (within the law, of course), and readers can decide whether the work is good or not.

Seems to me that many must agree that Tolkien's battlefield depictions work.