Did Tolkien find the idea of war honourable?

[Nilpaurion Felagund]

Was it Dietrich Bonhoeffer who said that all that is necessary for evil to win is for good men to do nothing?

"The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing."

-Edmund Burke.

Also World War II could have been avoided easily if only the Allied leaders had had a bit of diplomatic backbone about them,(Remilitarisation of the Rhineland and the Sudetenland spring to mind).

I don't know. It is said that Hitler had his ultimate goal planned out(the Lebensraum thing) - it's his road map that's under construction. Had Chamberlain not given Rhineland, Austria, and Sudetenland to Hitler, war would have broken out sooner.

But then, if the Allies had shown they mean business, Hitler would have backed off, even if only a little.

Many people have replied above that they guess hand to hand fighting is more "romantic" than the wars of today.

Probably had something to do with the fact that you needed skill back then. Now, it only takes a few men(well, maybe more than twenty, but still few compared to a fighting force with the same destructive power) to annihilate humanity in one hour. Where's skill in that?

Tolkien participated in WW1, an honourable war at the beginning, due to that fact that every one of the original belligerents were fighting for something: Britain for Belgium; Russia for Serbia; Belgium and Serbia for their sovereignty; France, defending against an unprovoked attack; Germany for its ally, and itself from encirclement; and Austria-hungary, for its very existence.* But then, the means to fight were very degrading. Men were forced on useless attacks to gain a few yards, forced to hide in trenches to survive, and generally removed of their humanity, being turned into an instrument of violence.

Now Tolkien might have found the idea of war for a higher cause honourable, but the modern means to wage it was deplorable. So he went on to write about the medieval means, where men were men, not machines.

Later days! [img]smilies/cool.gif[/img]
->Elenrod

P.S. Sorry if I turned into a quasi-analysis of the World Wars. [img]smilies/wink.gif[/img]

*with credits to Encyclopedia Britannica. [img]smilies/biggrin.gif[/img]

<font size=1 color=339966>[ 10:40 PM January 28, 2004: Message edited by: Nilpaurion Felagund ]