Fantasy

[Bêthberry]

Originally Posted by davem

From an account by Army surgeon Richard Wiseman at the Siege of Taunton in 1645, during the English Civil War. Horrible & graphic, but please read to the end..

I quote only your source, davem, because it is its genre which is significant: an historical account, an eye witness. Would such extensive details be given in literary epics of war from the time--the Civil War? Did Cromwell's bloody assaults in Ireland make it into the poetry books? They certainly aren't collected in the usual anthologies of the time.

Compare these literary battle epics with Tolkien and consider how different or similar is his use of graphic detail to what they enlist:

The Battle of Maldon (Modern translation)

Selections from Sheamus Heaney's translation of Beowulf This link is particularly interesting as it is devoted to translations of the ancient poem from 1805/1826 to the present. I haven't read them all as I think Heaney's translation gives a good general sense of the epic style.

The point you are harping on, in a different context, would be well worth thinking about, the difference between historical war accounts and literary genres, or the difference between twentieth century attitudes towards war and those of earlier centuries. However, your bloody insistence that Tolkien's personal experience of war must necessarily trump his literary experience of war is a travesty of imaginative creativity as well as of psychology. We might well ask why Tolkien did not indulge in the modern style as the other war poets did (Sassoon etc), but that only shows again how his work is not "modern." Tolkien hated modern literature for its language style and loved old literature, for its language's sake. We can read his own acknowledgement that he sought a release from the personal imperative in the old epics.

But you haven't simply asked about the difference. You have couched it in a demand that Tolkien's work follow a different drummer, one whose beat you have measured. I suppose you think that's what makes this thread interesting, but like the straw man in The Wizard of Oz, it lacks real fibre--a spark or tinder ends it all.

But since you enjoy smoking so much--or at least defend it so often, here's some to enjoy