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Originally Posted by Inziladun
Well, he was certainly familiar with both the 1918 Influenza and the gas warfare on the Great War battlefields. I do agree though that Tolkien was rather averse to 'scientific' explanations for fantasy plot elements.
To me the mystery is whether the illness was a physical malady or something spiritual.
If the former, there must have been some means of spreading the affliction to the right people.
If the latter, how would it be communicated from one victim to the next?
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I would suggest plague is both a physical and spiritual malady. Here is a description by Giovanni Boccaccio, who lived through and wrote about the Black Death of 1348:
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One citizen avoided another, hardly any neighbour troubled about others, relatives never or hardly ever visited each other. Moreover, such terror was struck into the hearts of men and women by this calamity, that brother abandoned brother, and the uncle his nephew, and the sister her brother, and very often the wife her husband. What is even worse and nearly incredible is that fathers and mothers refused to see and tend their children, as if they had not been theirs.”
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Such an insidious and all-consuming plague loosened all familial ties, and ended all pretense of hope and humanity. It was, for most of those living amongst the dying, the end of the world, literally. Barbara Tuchman in her splendid history "A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century" wrote of one such instance:
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In Kilkenny, Ireland, Brother John Clyn of the Friars Minor, another monk left alone among dead men, kept a record of what had happened lest "things which should be remembered perish with time and vanish from the memory of those who come after us." Sensing "the whole world, as it were, placed within the grasp of the Evil One," and waiting for death to visit him too, he wrote, "I leave parchment to continue this work, if perchance any man survive and any of the race of Adam escape this pestilence and carry on the work which I have begun." Brother John, as noted by another hand, died of the pestilence, but he foiled oblivion.
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Having no conception of a plague carried by fleas on the backs of rats, and rats being a constant companion of medieval man -- and therefore not out of the ordinary -- it was, as a Welsh dirge described the plague "death coming in our midst like black smoke". Tuchman condensed several reports of the coming of the plague through Asia and the Middle-East and then to Europe into one concise and fantastic (as in mythological) paragraph:
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Reports from the East, swollen by fearful imaginings, told of strange tempests and “sheets of fire” mingled with huge hailstones that “slew almost all,” or a “vast rain of fire” that burned up men, beasts, stones, trees, villages, and cities. In another version, “foul blasts of wind” from the fires carried the infection to Europe “and now as some suspect it cometh round the seacoast.” Accurate observation in this case could not make the mental jump to ships and rats because no idea of animal- or insect-borne contagion existed.
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Therefore, to a pre-technological, superstitious and non-scientific society, a plague coming on a foul wind has historical precedent.