[Rumil]

I must confess that I missed the final showdown, and I so wanted to see the scion of the House of Tolkien as well.

One thing that really gets my goat about the criticism of Tolkien for not fully showing the horrors of warfare, in fact two things are-

1- Yes he does! The scnes with Sam and the soldier of Harad explains far more about the human condition than you'll ever get out of War and Peace

2- Jane Austen - she and her co-conspirators wrote, it must be said, elegant commentaries on the whole mating game. However, this was during the middle of the Napoleonic Wars, the greatest conflict the world had ever seen upto that time! Does she acknowledge this fact - never! Soldiers are only introduced as Yeomanry officers in sharp suits, how inferior to Tolstoy let alone Tolkien. I have a theory that the entire history of the British Empire was due to an entirely justifiable urge to escape the narrow minded socially restrictive petty one-up-womanship displayed in these novels, with the predictably disastrous results.

(Rant over, [img]smilies/smile.gif[/img] )