[Lush]

Your response was a little extreme (heroin needles, dirty, debased, acid flash-backs, and the like). But I took no offense.

As you very well shouldn't, because my intent was, naturally, not to offend. Not that heroin needles are in themselves that gruesome (rather the purposes behind them). The things I've described above are common, and even tame, comparitively speaking (for better or for worse, naturally). And no, I wouldn't those sorts of themes to be part of the LOTR. That would be freakish, to say the least.

It was another way of saying that I personally don't particularly need or enjoy an author's intimate examination of a character's psychological states and struggles to find depth. Maybe in LotR I am finding depth of character, not depth of psychology.

Yeah. So as I predicted, this discussion is, at least in part, being re-focused on matters of taste. Which are useless to argue about. It's like asking someone why they like the colour blue and not pink, you know? [img]smilies/wink.gif[/img]

Anyway, my use of "modern" is not a technical term, but a way of saying modern writing styles that focus on the psychological treatment of the characters. So mentioning Freud was extraneous, perhaps just a slip.

Ah, I see your point. I would argue that psychological treatment of characters is not necessarily a modern development (I mean, I think Sophocles was doing it back in the day...But I'll shut up about Sophocles before we bring Sigmund back for another round [img]smilies/wink.gif[/img] ). But Tolkien was dancing to a whole other tune when he was writing the LOTR, and his interests, I believe, were in a different place. And it worked out nicely in the end, as we all know.

Practically, the Victorians made major effect in change for the positive. Perhaps the literature you are reading from that era would give you a different picture. But authors fantasize.

My opinion of Victorian hypocrisy stems from both historical and literary texts. Though I would add that every age is hypocritical in its own right, and dwelling on the short-comings of those who came before us is not in my taste anyway.

Yet, the evil influences of the era were not uniform, for the British people did stand, even alone, until the US woke to the crisis and joined the fray.

Totally off-topic here (my apologies to everyone involved), but unless I am mistaken, WWII was fought on two fronts: the western and the eastern front. And the US and Britain were not the only ones fighting against Nazi Germany at the time.

Well, that's it from me. Thank you, Saucy, for reminding me again of Denethor. Now that dude was complex.