[davem]

Originally Posted by obloquy

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."

My point is that one does not have to go into graphic descriptive detail, spending a paragraph describing the effect of a poleaxe blow to the face. One can simply state that 'X was hit in the face by a poleaxe' - rather than 'X was felled by a blow'. The first brings home the horror of battle in a way the second doesn't (&, btw, removes X's chance of making a profound farewell speech in the way that most men who fell in battle were denied that. They didn't get the chance to say goodbye.)

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.

Tolkien repeatedly claimed that 'Middle-earth' was our Primary world in the ancient past. The same rules apply - a sword blow or arrow strike will have exactly the same effect on the Pelennor as it would at Crecy.

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.

Which actually creates the impression that the battlefield is not all that horrible a place - or at least not as horrible as it actually was. If rape is used as a weapon of war & a means of intimidation (as it pretty much always has been) we may not require a writer to describe the act in detail, but we would require him not to refer to it as 'making love to the women on the opposing side without their consent'.

If we look at the slaughter of Towton, or Agincourt ( soldiers screaming in pain sans limbs & innards, faces crushed & hacked open with bladed weapons, men at arms trampled & suffocating in the mud, mutilation of the dead & dying, men fleeing in terror being cut down - often by their own side, or executed later for 'cowardice', etc) are we to take it that that kind of thing didn't happen on the Pelennor against Easterlings & Southrons at the hands of Gondorians & Rohirrim , or that it happened, but Tolkien chose not to mention it? If its the latter then our whole impression of the nobility of the Men of the West is dealt a body blow. If its the former, then they were so different from men in battle in the primary world, particularly in the dark age & medieval period, then we have no real connection with them emotionally & psychologically anymore than we have with Robert E Howard's 'mighty-thewed barbarian'.

(This must be my fifth edit - but I wanted to just go back to Obloquy's statement:

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.

Which goes to the heart of this thread - how much freedom does a writer of Fantasy have? Does he or she have the right to depict war, & death in battle, as a nice, clean, civilised thing or God as a senile old fake? Is it simply the case that a writer of fantasy can set down on the page whatever they can imagine, or do we have the right to request they reside within particular boundaries? It would seem to me that many more folk are offended by Pullman's employing his freedom as a writer of fantasy to depict God in the way he does than they are by Tolkien's cleaned up & sanitised battlefields.

What I've been wondering all along is why that would be the case - or is it simply that they like what Tolkien did but dislike what Pullman did - are the boundaries to be set for a Fantasy writer's freedom determined simply by personal taste or whim? Pullman is not justified because I didn't like what he did, but Tolkien is justified because I did like what he did?