[davem]

Originally Posted by obloquy

There's no reason to assume some kind of magic prevented the mutilation of bodies slain with the cruel weapons of the age. Therefore, that death happened in a real way seems patent enough, and Tolkien's refrainment is perhaps to do with this presumption.

Nope. There is a very important reason to assume the mutilation of bodies with the cruel weapons of the age was absent- Tolkien created Middle-earth & it only contains what Tolkien included. Tolkien did not include the horrors of dying in battle. People don't die horribly, even when 'pierced by many arrows' or having a full size horse dumped on top of them. The most horrific death in LotR (Denethor's) can be dismissed (comfortably) as being his own fault. Why do we assume the reader will 'assume' that people will die in M-e in the same way as some poor bugger at Agincourt, Towton, Kineton Fight or the Somme? I didn't. My 'assumptions' of how people died in those battles was actually shaped by movies like Olivier's Henry V, or Knights of the Round Table & to an extent also by reading Tolkien . It was only when I began reading up on military history that I began to see what was absent in Tolkien's depictions of battle - & that was exactly the kind of thing I've brought up in this discussion.

Yes, it should be absent. In part because what is happening in Middle-earth is largely NOT what "human beings do to each other," but rather what humans and orcs do to each other.

Except that Hillmen, Eastgerlings & Southrons are also involved. So this is about what humans do to other humans - its just that Tolkien avoids dealing with it.

Orcs are manifestly evil, intended to be strictly unsympathetic. One might argue that what orcs do to humans (or more broadly what any warring humanoids do to one another) might be relevant.

Which is what I have been arguing. By offering us an unsympathetic foe Tolkien is able to have his heroes kill thousands of them with impunity & never suffer the inconvenience of having to ask if what they're doing is right, face the possiblity that they have 'sinned', or, most importantly in this context, show them any respect.

Perhaps one reason that Tolkien refuses to embrace an allegorical reading of his story is exactly your point: any correlation of LotR's conflicts to the wars of the 20th century would be dishonest and dehumanizing.

This is not about allegorising. Its about reality (or 'secondary reality'). Its also about what readers take from the story. Now, one can decide 'Its just a fantasy, pure escapism. It means nothing at all & has no value beyond a few hours entertainment.' But... if one does take that approach then one, surely, must treat the whole book that way - the beauty of the natural world, the self-sacrifice of Frodo, the depiction of the corrupting effect of desire for power & control - none of that, or even the incredible feat of imagination behind it all - all just escapism & without any relevance to the reader beyond escaping the harsh realities of the real world for a bit.

The point is - everything else is there, except the reality of how people die in battle, which is skipped over. They're alive, they're dead, & the corpses (with their neat, tidy & instantly & painlessly mortal wounds) nicely disappear to save the survivors the sordid necessity of shovelling up the body parts & heaving the hundreds of thousands of bits into a mass grave. Then the survivors can get on with composing a nice elegy & replacing the trees with a clear conscience. Middle-earth is the most beautifully, perfectly created secondary world, Tolkien's prose touches perfection in many parts of LotR & his vision, his understanding of the human condition is profound. His meditations on the nature of mortality against immortality provide some of the most thought provoking moments in the whole of literature.

But his battle scenes are all fake. There, & only there, does he descend into an Edwardian, Boy's Own, vision of knights in shining armour, of derring do on the battlefield, of Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori & in Tolkien it is sweet & glorious to die on the field - because death on the field is quick & painless, free from suffering.