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Originally Posted by William Cloud Hicklin
No more than he expects us to see reeking scat emerging from Strider's fundament.
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But were the broken, hacked up bodies actually there?Did people actualy DIE, or did they just get nicely DEAD.
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I'm not sure what really would have been gained had Tolkien written some grimly relativistic work wherein both sides were all right bastards. His thesis was that the Good exists and is worth defending, which remains true today as it did in the Forties- even though we know that the Allies didn't "set out with all unspotted soldiers." After all, his theory of Recovery is a process of viewing the world through a different prism.
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In WWI there were decent Germans - ordinary young men who fought bravely & died horribly - it wasn't a case of good allies & evil Huns. Same applies in WWII. Yet in M-e the enemy are uniformly evil & can be dispatched with impunity. We never feel the tragedy of war - the waste of life on both sides (apart from Sam's moment of questioning in Ithilien - Sam wonders if the young man is truly evil, but for all we know he might have been. Sam's questioning shows us Sam's humanity, but we never see any 'humanity' among the enemy. And if we had we wouldn't have the story we have. If we got to know the Easterlings or Southrons as people we wouldn't have been able to tolerate their easy slaughter.
So, the 'truth' about how people die in battle, what human beings do to each other on the field, is absent. Should it be? Its an omission, but do we lose or gain by that omission? To repeat my earlier point:
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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.
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