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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 agree that science and fantasy shouldn't always mix - though there is a part of my brain that pops the question of whether Faramir, Eowyn, and Merry had respiratory acidosis while unconscious from the Black Breath... ^.^
If the malady was spiritual (akin to the Black Breath, the depression-which-kills-directly, or something similar), it would not even need a contagion for transmission. If Sauron poisoned Gondor's population by taking away their will to fight for life as the Nazgul did, would it have required any physical means or vector? I would imagine that version as more of a changing of moods like the changing of weather: something that hovers over everyone at once, with some people perhaps being a bit more affected than others. Like rainfall. Or electromagnetic radiation. Or something else that directly affects the population at large.
If that was so, though, I do wonder whether Gondor's famous healers would have used words like "plague" for something that was not infectious. And how well they would be able to differentiate infectious versus the "curse from above" scenario.
This is again an offshoot of my old vision of the plague as a physical explosion of Sauron's malice in the form of pathetic fallacy. But whether a physical infection or a spiritual malady - I might even prefer the latter, but wouldn't bet against the former.