Thread: Fantasy
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Old 12-07-2008, 01:31 AM   #8
obloquy
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But again, its not the detail in which the fact is described, but the acknowledgement of the fact itself.
No, your issue is clearly with detail, not honesty. Tolkien acknowledges and portrays the gritty truth of war: lots of people die on both sides. That is "the fact," and anything more descriptive than that is "the detail in which the fact is described."

Even if Tolkien had written that all the warriors in those days died by disintegrating before any damage to their bodies occurred, it would still be an honest and acceptable depiction of war in Middle-earth. One could only accuse Tolkien of sanitizing warfare in this hypothesis if one imagines (irrationally) that Tolkien intended for the patently fantastic rules of an explicitly fantastic world to be transferred to the "Primary World" to illuminate certain truths. With the information Tolkien does provide, one might reasonably imagine all the severings and disembowelments one wishes. That Tolkien does not imagine them for us does not make his depiction dishonest, though it does indicate that preaching of the horrors of the battlefield was not his objective.
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