[davem]

There's a point made by Matthew Dickerson in his new book, Following Gandalf, that apart from Helm's Deep, all the major battles in Hobbit & LotR are seen either from a distance, or through the eyes of Hobbits, or described by participants after the event. At the Battle of the Five Armies, we see through Bilbo's eyes, & though its said that it was one of the proudest events of his life, he gets hit on the head by a rock & spends most ot it unconcscious, & his experience of it is as being nasty, violent & the kind of thing best avoided if at all possible, & he tells the dying Thorin that it has all been a 'bitter adventure if it must end so'. At Pelennor Fields, what do we see of the actual battle? The focus is on Theoden's death & Eowyn's courage & Eomer's grief & resulting battle madness, all seen from Merry's perspective. And while the victory, against all odds, may be glorious, because unexpected, it ends with a dirge, & a desription of all those who have given their lives. The Battle before the Black Gates is seen mostly from Pippin's perspective, & he spends most of the time thinking about how terrible it all is & wanting to be back with his best friend. Yes, there is Helm's Deep, but there is little focus there on glory, mostly on the struggle to retain hope in the face of overwhelming evil. Gimli & Legolas do have their 'competition' but these are members of races with an especial loathing of Orcs & a tendency to want to exterminate them from the face of the earth, even more than men do, but it is also about courage in the face of adversity, & an attempt to lift each other's spirits.

As has been said, after the Somme, where two out of his three closest friends died in horrific circumstances, Tolkien couldn't glorify war, but while hating it, he did feel it necessary, sometimes, because we are fallen beings in a fallen world, & Middle Earth is full of the malice & evil of Morgoth, who sent his power into the very matter of Arda, so that, as he said, the whole of Middle Earth is Morgoth's 'Ring'. It seems to me that Tolkien's attitude to war is summed up in statements by Elrond & Galadriel, about having seen 'many defeats & many fruitless victories', & about 'Fighting the Long Defeat'. War is inevitable, & will keep on happening. He says that even while fighting in WW1 & seeing those around him die, he never believed in all that 'war to end wars' stuff.

Another interesting point, made in a talk at Oxonmoot by Jean Chausse, is that out of all Tolkien's major characters, only two, Turin & Boromir, actively go out & seek 'glory & renown in battle, & both come to tragic ends. All the others are forced into battle to defend what they love, & Tolkien's ideal warrior is Faramir, who, he says, out of all the characters in LotR, is the one he felt closest to.