There seems to be an interesting and uneasy combination of massacre and romantic warfare intertwined in Tolkien's writing.
Just maybe it has to do with the WW1 experiences? Just think of the gap between the literature & ideals Tolkien had read and honoured and the brutal industrially efficient killing of the war. And even if I'm no WW1 historian even I have read descriptions of courageous captains and soldiers who tried to live with some quasi-chivalric code in that war and we all know what happened to them... Polish cavalry even tried it against the Wehrmacht panzers in the second world war!!! (they were probably the last "knights" of Western warfare)
So maybe Tolkien was trying to combine these two? Or maybe he wished to reinstate the chivalry but the reality overtook him as he wrote the battle scenes? Or maybe he wished us to become uneasy in just this way thinking about the uneasy co-existence of chivalric ideas and modern warfare... Whatever.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Anárion Cúthalion
I believe it was the theologist Sorenson who said that evil as we understand it is merely "shadow", that evil is not a separate comcept by a twisted version of good. Perhaps Tolkien was influenced in some manner by that thought.
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The idea stems from an early church-fathers consil (I'm not sure if it was the famous Nichaean consil or some other one they held in the first centuries A.D.) where Manicheanism - which said there are autonomous principles of Good and Evil which fight in the world and thus limit each other - was judged to be a heretical way of thinking. After that it has been more or less the official dogma of Christianity that evil is just lack of goodness or twisted goodness if you wish. Even if it has been challenged every now and then during the history.
In this sense I think Tolkien was an orthodox-christian - not meaning a Greek-Catholic but one following the "right doctrine" (
orthos doxa). And all the problems that follow from the "orthodox" Christian position follow with Eru as well. That was the reason of my lighthearted playfulness in my last post. Sorry. But I couldn't resist the temptation there and not to bring the theodicea-problem forwards with Eru...
