Where did the Enlightenment/Renaissance debate come from? It doesn't seem that relevant to the subject, other than specific examples of war tactics, and bottom line, who cares what time period they were technically from, it's the specific examples that matter. Certainly the perception of the plagues in ME could have followed the general view of the spread of diseases before the role of microorganisms was established (and Enlightenment or not, there are still people today who refuse to do some treatments for unscientific, even superstitious reasons. Heck, I refuse to take pills for very unscientific reasons, and I pay my tuition to learn how they work, among other things). It's not what happened in each real-world history period that matters, or where the boundaries lie between periods. Middle-earth history draws ideas in part from real-world history, in part from real-world legends and myths, which makes these topics relevant, but shouldn't make them the subject matter of the discussion.
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Originally Posted by Morthoron
P.S. In any case, I apologize for going so far afield and dealing in such extraneous debate, and returning to Sauron, I still feel he or Morgoth didn't invent the plague; they were either agents for spreading it, or took an evil delight in taking credit for it. Particularly since Tolkien inferred that Sauron, at least, could not control it from decimating his own minions.
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Certainly. I do not think that Sauron or Morgoth purposefully (or accidentally, for that matter)
created the plague. Perhaps I'm taking this too much like a Pandora's box, but it seems to me that once the perfection of the world was ruined, it was ruined with all the ruin known to man at once. It's just that you can't have all the bad stuff happening simultaneously, it happens bit by bit, and it can be controlled and directed. And we know from the horse's mouth that neither one could really create. However, I still believe that the plagues could have been a ripple of the Dark Lords' mood mirrored in nature. Either way, they were not a conscious creation, but just a use of something already present. I might only disagree with you on whether the use of conscious or not, but that's just a matter of personal preference.