Quote:
Originally Posted by davem
The real point is - Tolkien may be true to his traditional sources but he is lying through his teeth when it comes to the reality of death in battle - & he must have known he was lying . Does the fact that he was writing a 'fantasy' novel excuse him? Was he presenting the opposing view to a WWI veteran like Wilfrid Owen - or was he trying to pretend that he hadn't written what he did? One can right about a morally justified war, but ought one to lie about such a simple fact of human nature that when men fight & kill in battle they do horrible things to each other, & that an arrow in the gut, or a sword slash to the face, is a vicious & ugly way to die. Is such a 'fantasy' morally justifiable after the Somme?
Tolkien's 'sin' is not that he fails to depict violent death in a graphic way - its that he goes to the other extreme & shows it as too clean & neat.
|
Yes, clearly Tolkien took another path than Wilfrid Owen, Robert Graves or Siegfried Sassoon:
(Excerpt from
'Counter-attack', 1918)
The place was rotten with dead; green clumsy legs
High-booted, sprawled and grovelled along the saps
And trunks, face downward, in the sucking mud,
Wallowed like trodden sand-bags loosely filled;
And naked sodden buttocks, mats of hair,
Bulged, clotted heads slept in the plastering slime.
And then the rain began,— the jolly old rain!
(Excerpt from
'Suicide in the Trenches', 1918)
In winter trenches, cowed and glum,
With crumps and lice and lack of rum,
He put a bullet through his brain.
No one spoke of him again.
I suppose, in retrospect, that it is for the very lack of graphic violence and dwelling on the gross and horrific that Tolkien receives such adulation, and a wide demographic of readers. I doubt very much that Tolkien's work would find its way into grade school (or primary school) libraries if he dwelt on clumps of brains and clots of hair and sodden buttocks like Sassoon. It is the restrained nature of the presentation that allows it to be enjoyed by eight year-olds and eighty year-olds alike.
I don't recall him referring to this topic specifically in his letters, but I'll give them a brief perusal over the weekend to see if he offered any clarifications regarding his depictions of battle or violence.