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Old 12-04-2002, 12:47 AM   #22
Gwaihir the Windlord
Essence of Darkness
 
Join Date: Jul 2000
Location: Evermore
Posts: 1,420
Gwaihir the Windlord has just left Hobbiton.
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Anyways, that really reminds me of the atlles between Ireland/Scotland and England. Maybe tolkien wanted the wights to be like the dead Irish and Scottish soldiers who died fighting the English. Since Tolkien was English, he might take the side of the English and think that the Irish/Scottish were evil, so he made them into wights, who were evil and did come out of Angmar. Or maybe the wights were supposed to be like the English who died fighting the Irish/Scottish. Tolkien might have recognized that what the English did was wrong and he wanted to portray them as evil wights.
Sorry, but that's tripe. No one these days in Britain thinks too much about those wars, I mean taking them seriously, except for fanatics and nationalists. It was just power struggles. I'm sure that none of it carried into Tolkien's writings.

Why should the Wights have anything to do with the 'British' Middle-Earthers, anyway? The Shire could not represent England, not the whole of it. It represents perhaps where Tolkien grew up, but there is more to England than idealistic countryside and simple farming people. That the invading evil from Angmar was supposed to be the Scots seems very unreasonable. For a start, the Scots weren't evil -- no more than anyone else, anyway -- , they didn't really invade England much (more the other way around mostly), and in the end the two countries forged a union; something Angmar and Arnor certainly did not do. I really don't think the England-Scotland wars had anything to do with Middle-Earth whatsoever.

Having read a few of these posts, this is what I think. Certain parts of Middle-Earth did relate back to Britain, but actual events in Britain were not involved. Such thoughts of ME wars realting to British wars is pretty far-fetched. Tolkien set out to create a mythology for ancient Britain, not create a seperate fantasy world based on it.

As for the fog... Ireland and Scotland aren't the only parts of the British Isles to have an abundance of that, you know.
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