Fantasy

[davem]

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.

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....)

[Gwathagor]

Originally Posted by davem

Unless you're the sacrifice - in which case it probably hurts. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

Of course it hurts, but that does not detract from (and maybe adds to) the beauty of willing sacrifice - which, I should add, is objective and has nothing to with the beholder.

[davem]

Originally Posted by Gwathagor

Of course it hurts, but that does not detract from (and maybe adds to) the beauty of willing sacrifice - which, I should add, is objective and has nothing to with the beholder.

Including suicide bombers?

[William Cloud Hicklin]

The duality was present in Tolkien's mind, certainly. Here is a passage he wrote shortly after his war service:

'Aye, often enough,' said Eriol, 'yet not to the great wars of the earthly kings, which are cruel and bitter, whelming all in their ruin all the beauty of the earth and of those fair things that men fashion with their hands in times of peace -- nay, they spare not sweet women and tender maids, such as thou, Veanne Melinir, for then are men drunk with wrath and the lust of blood, and Melko fares abroad. But gallant affrays have I seen wherein brave men did sometimes meet, and swift blows were dealt, and strength of body and of heart was proven.'

Again, the 'great wars' are of Melko, as the ghastly moonscape of the Western Front was transferred to Sauron: it was almost as if Tolkien envisioned war as he knew it being the enemy, and wrote of its defeat by 'gallant affrays.'

Still, it's a bit much to expect a man like Tolkien to write with mud-and-dung realism. He never describes Aragorn relieving himself behind a bush, nor does he detail the process by which Sam and Rosie produced all those children. They are to be assumed, in the same way blood and gore are to be assumed.

There is probasbly something to be mined comparing the hopelessness of the War of the Jewels, written in its essentials in the shadow of the pointless First World War, with the triumphalism of the War of the Rings, written during the Second- even bloodier than its predecessor, but a war nonetheless with a point and a purpose.

[William Cloud Hicklin]

Suicide bombers? Say, rather, kamikazes, in whose willingness to die in defense of their homeland by sinking enemy ships there was a terrible beauty. One could also mention Leonidas' Spartans.

[davem]

Originally Posted by William Cloud Hicklin

Still, it's a bit much to expect a man like Tolkien to write with mud-and-dung realism. He never describes Aragorn relieving himself behind a bush, nor does he detail the process by which Sam and Rosie produced all those children. They are to be assumed, in the same way blood and gore are to be assumed.

But are the blood & gore to be assumed? Does Tolkien really intend us to see the shattered, hacked up bodies, the adrenalin driven attrocities commited by the 'good' guys as well as the Orcs, the 'cowardice', the 'friendly fire' incidents, the 'camp followers'? Is 'all human life' (good & bad) to be found in Middle-earth? If I assume that some Gondorian troops tortured & mutilated Easterling prisoners, or that their commanders arranged for 'cowards' to be executed at dawn, is that acceptable? I'd say not - because those things clearly did not happen in M-e, anymore than people actually 'die' instead of going rather quickly & neatly from quick to dead (unless of course they have a moving death speech to make before the end).

And that still leaves the problem of Sam's grief being greater for lost trees than for lost Hobbits.

But the question still remains 'Should Tolkien have avoided that aspect, & does the omission leave out something of vital importance?'

Tolkien decided to omit real dying in his story about death - is that something he should have done? If he honestly knew, as he did, that death in battle was a horrible, sickening thing should he not have made that clear? And by omitting it did he not miss out one of the essential points of why death is terrible - death is a terrible thing not just because it deprives the survivors of the victim's presence, but because the ending of one's life on the field is gross, agonising & generally without dignity. In fact, he did not simply omit to mention he horror of dying in battle, he created a world in which such horror is largely absent. In battle one is reduced to the state of an animal in an abattoir, hacked down & left to die in the mud. One may die for a noble cause, but the way one dies is rarely noble & on the field a dying knight & his dying horse are far more similar than many like to think. Except in Middle-earth.

[William Cloud Hicklin]

But are the blood & gore to be assumed? Does Tolkien really intend us to see the shattered, hacked up bodies,

No more than he expects us to see reeking scat emerging from Strider's fundament.

the adrenalin driven attrocities commited by the 'good' guys... Is 'all human life' (good & bad) to be found in Middle-earth? If I assume that some Gondorian troops tortured & mutilated Easterling prisoners, or that their commanders arranged for 'cowards' to be executed at dawn,

Is 'all human life' (good & bad) to be found in Middle-earth? No, actually, I don't believe so. The Thrid Age was I think palpably different from whatever Age this is, and not just because the fantasy creatures are gone.

I sometimes liken Tolkien's idea of the progress of moral evil to an ink-drop in a glass of water: at first a distinct black globule, which starts to send out streamers and tendrils until it is all dissolved- but the water is now grey. We live in the Grey Age. The War of the Ring occurred when the ink-drop and its tendrils were still coherent- Sauron and his minions- but much of the water (Elves and many Men) was still largely clear or only slightly dingy. So, no, the Men of Gondor would not commit atrocities, just as, we are told, they do not lie, "not even [to] an Orc."

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.

[davem]

Originally Posted by William Cloud Hicklin

No more than he expects us to see reeking scat emerging from Strider's fundament.

But were the broken, hacked up bodies actually there?Did people actualy DIE, or did they just get nicely DEAD.

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.

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:

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.

[obloquy]

Originally Posted by davem

But were the broken, hacked up bodies actually there?Did people actualy DIE, or did they just get nicely DEAD.

There's no reason to assume some kind of magic prevented the mutilation of bodies slain with the cruel weapons of the age. Therefore, that death happened in a real way seems patent enough, and Tolkien's refrainment is perhaps to do with this presumption.

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:

Yes, it should be absent. In part because what is happening in Middle-earth is largely NOT what "human beings do to each other," but rather what humans and orcs do to each other. Orcs are manifestly evil, intended to be strictly unsympathetic. One might argue that what orcs do to humans (or more broadly what any warring humanoids do to one another) might be relevant. But really, it seems pretty clear that Tolkien's purpose was decidedly not to illuminate these grisly truths, for those reasons you have yourself beaten to death. Perhaps one reason that Tolkien refuses to embrace an allegorical reading of his story is exactly your point: any correlation of LotR's conflicts to the wars of the 20th century would be dishonest and dehumanizing.