Quote:
Originally Posted by Gwathagor
I think that it can be considered a happy ending; Frodo made a conscious sacrifice and was content with it. And sacrifice is beautiful.
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Unless you're the sacrifice - in which case it probably hurts. Beauty is in the eye of the
beholder .
Let's look at a specific example - one main charater's reaction to an event & how that even is presented to us readers. In the battle of Bywater 19 Hobbits are killed. They are (we assume) killed by Ruffians, not by 'Friendly Fire' in the chaos (though a reading of real wartime events - say from the English Civil Wars - reveals a lot of incidents of gross stupidity, not simply from the commanders, but from idiot soldiers discharging firearms at their own side, or from prisoners held on powder wagons being given lights for their pipes & blowing themselves & surrounding soldiers to pieces... however, I digress). 'kay, so, these Hobbits are killed....how? By Ruffians with knives, whips & clubs. How do we think they
actually died? Blow to the head which brings instant death? Stab through the heart which leads to painless oblivion? No - maybe one or two of them if they were very lucky, but anyone who has read up on medieval combat will know that most of those deaths would have been drawn out affairs of possibly a few hours, with lots of blood, screaming & unpleasant odours. They would, in the main, have been Hobbiton Hobbits who Sam would have known all his life... but for him the felled trees 'were the greatest loss'. This isn't simply a refusal on Tolkien's part to give us the graphic detail of how people really die in battle - its a flat refusal to acknowledge that its actually bad. If Sam is truly more devastated by the loss of the trees than the loss of the Hobbits then there's something up with Sam. The idea that the Shire could drift back to normal afterwards & only Frodo carry a burden of pain & suffering says a lot about the other Hobbits capacity for not giving a damn about the loss of their friends.
So much death happens, but it has so little longs term effect on people - the survivors hold a funeral, sing a song about the fallen, & then plant some trees. And it seems to me that we don't actually question this - Tolkien's depiction of battle
is romanticised - & that is my point: there are not only two alternatives -
either you do what Tolkien did, & present death in battle with a romantic, elegiac glow
or you go in for a pornographic depiction of blood, snot & vomit which would sicken the majority of readers & make the book unreadable. There is a third alternative - to acknowldge the horror of actual death by not simply stating 'X dozens, hundreds or thousands lay dead' or 'X was cut down by axes '& walked never again in the flowering meads of his homeland under the evening stars' - which is a way of not writing about how X died. As I said earlier - most of the casualties in LotR don't
really die, they just get dead. Alive one second, dead the next with the unpleasant transition avoided.
LotR is about death, but its not about dying - which is odd in a war novel.
But, again, as I keep getting accused of wanting slo-mo close-ups of graphic violence in the book.... why does Tolkien shy away from the depiction of dying in a book about death, is that honest, & are we, as readers, deprived of something if that aspect is left out? We've been discussing on another thread the effect of medieval weaponry - the damage that an axe will inflict over that of a sword - & we've talked about how an axe, or battle hammer doesn't have to penetrate to kill, 'cos it will still break bones & burst internal organs beneath armour with the force of impact. How many people died on the Pelennor with that kind of injury? (What did they do with the corpses btw - another thing Tolkien avoids dealing with - the casualties (apart from the main characters), having made the quick, clean, painless transition from living to dead, conveniently disappear from the text without the need for the gathering up of body parts & burial of bits.
Tolkien is omitting facts here - facts he had learned from personal experience.
(Anyway, really have to run....)