Fantasy

[davem]

The problem here is this Aunt Sally you keep setting up, in order to knock down & thus feel you have won the argument. I am not suggesting that Tolkien should have have depicted death in battle in the way you accuse me of. I am stating that Tolkien's depiction of death in battle is not true.

If I may quote LadyBrooke form an earlier post:

Oh dear, it appears I’m not expressing my self clearly enough, davem, if you still think that I think that you advocate graphic violence. I don’t, and agree with you that Tolkien could have expressed more of the reality of war without having to go into graphic detail.

Battle has three 'aspects', if you will - there is (as I acknowledged earlier) honour, self-sacrifice, glory, excitement - even joy as displayed by the Rohirrim at Pelennor Fields, & all of this Tolkien gives us. Secondly, there is loss, death, bereavement. Again, Tolkien gives us this in spades. I'd say he is absolutely honest in his depiction of those two aspects of battle. But there is also a third aspect - people get maimed. They lose limbs, they die slowly & in agony. They may freeze to death overnight even if not mortally wounded (as at Kineton Fight during the English Civil War, or at Towton). They may just be left to die because there's no-one to treat them, or because they are not considered to be worth saving. Some die because they run away in terror & get cut down by their own side (Towon again). After the battle there has to be a clear up & burial - or the bodies rot & spread disease. Oh, & in battle people lose it when the adrenalin is flowing & do terrible & unecessary things to the foe.

And that's the aspect Tolkien doesn't deal with at all. Its equally true. The horror, the reduction of human to animal is absent. Is Tolkien's depiction of battle honest is the question, & if not, should it be? Also, of not, what is lost by that lack of honesty? In LotR it simply is seen as a 'brave & glorious thing' to die in battle against Sauron - or in other words Tolkien has written a tale which 'justifies' war by writing about a justifiable war. The uncomfortable questions - about the morality of killing for a cause, about whether 'Jaw-Jaw is better than War War', about whether pacifism is a more, or a less, morally justifiable philosophical position, are all neatly avoided by giving us a war that no 'decent' person could have any objection to fighting.

So, we have a war that the decent 'have' to fight & which is then depicted in a way that avoids any mention of the dirty, animal horror of real war. You cannot question the need to fight it, & you don't need to fret over being maimed, blinded or sent crazy as a result of fighting it, cos the worst that will happen is that you'll suffer a quick, clean death & then a minstrel will compose a verse in your memory which will be sung in the mead hall while maidens weep for you. The best is that you will return a great hero, to the acclamation of your family & friends. Apart fromFrodo, of course - but then he gets to travel with the Elves to the West rather than passing into a lonely, frightened & forgotten old age.

These might not have been the issues Tolkien wished to deal with in his book, they may not be as important as the ones he did choose to deal with, either, but they are real, war related, issues, & I can't see that its somehow unacceptable to ask about them.