[Rumil]

This debate brings me (oddly) back to the reason I disliked the A-Team (stay with me here, on-topic soon!).

OK the A-Team was all jolly good fun adventure stuff, good guys, bad guys, making AFVs out of tin cans and sticky-backed plastic, but it always rather worried me that nobody got shot. In every other scene thousands of rounds were blatted off between the protagonists, but nobody was killed or even bled a little bit. I even remember a scene where a helicopter crashed into a 300-foot cliff, blew up and smashed into the ground, then the crew got out of the wreck and staggered around slightly dazed but none the worse for their certain-death encounter.

In a series aimed at kids and teenagers in the USA, where guns are commonplace, it seemed frankly dangerous to have a show with lots of gunfights but no dire consequences.

In a way you might say the same of Tolkien's battles but there is not the same sense of immediacy. Youngsters may, in terrible cases, fool about with guns with fatal consequences, but I think few will raise an orcish army and march on their foes' citadel.

Thinking back to old films, war stories etc. from the 40s-50s period, it seems common that battle deaths are treated unrealistically. Cowboys bite the dust with nothing more than 'Ah ya got me', fighter pilots say 'Ginger got the chop old man' and move on. Did JRRT write the way he did because the mores of the times were against gruesome reality or because he wished LoTR to be 'purged of the gross', I don't know, maybe a bit of both?

Certainly he did include more realism in Turin's tale, including plenty of maimed and wounded, battle-madness and cowardice. But this he did not publish.

Tolkien's battles are usually (not, I'll agree, always) written from the Historian's lofty standpoint, featuring more of the wide overview and deeds of commanders than the mud and blood experience of the Poor Bloody Infantry. If we go 'in-book' we find that our authors (the hobbits) are mostly not involved in the fighting in the great battles. Bilbo gets knocked out, Merry probably has his eyes tight shut during the charge of the Rohirrim, then the Witch King showdown takes him out of the battle. Pippin gets squashed into unconsiousness under a troll. The Battle of Bywater is probably written by Frodo who was not involved in the fighting apart from getting the hobbits to spare the surrendering ruffians.

Therefore the battle sections are mostly what was told second-hand to the hobbits by Gandalf, Aragorn etc. I think they would not feel the need to burden the cheery halflings with the true brutality. Who's to say they'd be wrong?