[davem]

LadyBrooke - Thanks for a thoughtful contribution. Again, its difficult - despite being accused a few times of wanting to see graphic depictions of violence, I'm not suggesting any such thing. The point I was making is simply that we do not get a real sense of the animal horror of battle, & the question I was asking is simply this - 'Knowing the truth, that a battle is a terrible, ugly, disgusting place (medieval battlefields stank - of blood, vomit & excrement. The sreams of the wounded & dying were so terrible that they would be burned into the memories of those who experienced them even into old age - something which is still the case, even in our own 'modern' warfare). Many posters have given reasons why Tolkien avoided that aspect of battle, but my main question remains unanswered - 'Should Tolkien have avoided that aspect, & does the omission leave out something of vital importance?' And, again, why are his depictions of the suffering & death of the land so graphic (of Mordor -

"The gasping pools were choked with ash and crawling muds, sickly white and grey, as if the mountains had vomited the filth of their entrails upon the lands about. High mounds of crushed and powdered rock, great cones of earth fire-blasted and poison-stained, stood like an obscene graveyard in endless rows. ..."

people in the story, however badly wounded, don't 'vomit the filth of their entrails' on the earth but the earth itself does.

And something really weird just happened - googling to get that last quote I came across this essay, a review of the Jackson movies http://leesandlin.com/reviews/05_0107.htm which says many of the things I've been saying here (see, its not just me)

What's odd, though, is that Tolkien himself knew exactly how fake it was. For all you can tell from the movie, Peter Jackson might never have witnessed a violent act in his entire life, but Tolkien had been in battle: he had been a signalman on the front lines in World War I. He learned there firsthand that battle is squalid and gory and desperately confused. But when he wrote The Lord of the Rings he deliberately turned his back on the reality and put this pale Arthurian kitsch in its place.

That's not to say that the reality is missing. In fact Tolkien's experience of real warfare pervades The Lord of the Rings -- just in disguise. You can detect its presence from the quality of his prose, which tends to grow more forceful and impassioned whenever the secret subject makes itself felt.....

The Lord of the Rings is essentially a recasting of the war into an emotionally bearable form. Everything that made the war such a psychic torment is carefully contained, or eliminated from Middle Earth altogether. Nobody in the hobbit fellowship displays cowardice under fire; nobody ever accidentally kills somebody on his own side; nobody goes mad in the heat of battle. The warriors don't get bored or irritable or horny on their long journey to Mordor; not even the studly Aragorn ever sneaks away from camp at night to look for the nearest elf bordello. The few people in the book who oppose the war invariably turn out to be under the malign influence of Sauron. Even at the climax before the Black Gate of Mordor, when our heroes make a useless, suicidal charge against a fixed position (as tended to happen quite often on the western front), nobody suggests, even as a theoretical possibility, that their noble commanders might be fools.

It's an adolescent view of war, which is one reason the book tends to take adolescent readers by storm. You can see it reflected in every frame of the movie's battle scenes, which are teenage daydreams to the highest power, spiffy and dry-cleaned and sparklingly pretty, the best video games ever. The on-screen body count may be higher than Saving Private Ryan and Dawn of the Dead combined, but when the camera swoops and dives and soars over the swarming chaos of the virtual battlefield, somehow it never catches a glimpse of anybody writhing gracelessly in agony or sloppily bleeding to death. No wonder the movie copped only a PG-13 rating for its "epic battle scenes." "Epic" evidently means "wholly unreal." It's not true violence; it's barely even movie violence. It's just a million orcs blowing up real good, the way orcs are supposed to.

This fantasy may have been emotionally necessary for Tolkien. But it's dangerous for the rest of us to buy into. The danger isn't that we're bound to be disillusioned -- it's that we might not be. If the perennial success of the book and the celestial box office of the movies prove anything, it's that too many people still daydream of war in exactly the same way Tolkien did (in some cases because they learned it from him). Tolkien advocated a war of annihilation against the orcs, and that's harmless, because there are no such things as orcs. But then a real war breaks out, and orcs mysteriously start appearing on the other side. During World War II, Nazi propagandists called black American soldiers monkeys; American propagandists called Japanese soldiers monkeys. At Helm's Deep, Gimli and Legolas hold a contest to see how many orcs they can kill. Ask yourself whether anybody might be playing that game right now in Iraq.

The Lord of the Rings ends with the enemy not just defeated but annihilated: Sauron and all his works go up in a puff of smoke and are never seen in Middle Earth again. Even for a daydream, this is pretty infantile. But given the terms of Tolkien's war, is there any other way it could have gone?

David Jones was psychically broken by World War I, and, unlike Frodo, he didn't get to sail for elf heaven to be healed. He dedicated In Parenthesis to the soldiers he fought beside, "to the memory of those with me in the covert and in the open from the blackwall the broadway the cut the flats the level the environs" -- but he also dedicated it to "the enemy front-fighters who shared our pains against whom we found ourselves by misadventure." Frodo writes his memoirs at the end of The Lord of the Rings, but there's no such dedication to the orcs.

OK, now I don't go all the way with the writer - Tolkien was writing an 'epic romance' not reportage. I think he fails to appreciate Tolkien's art, & insults his work unnecessarily... but I don't think he's completely wrong. A very real, vital aspect of war is absent from Tolkien's war epic, & I certainly think its valid to ask why that's so, & what that means.