[Eurytus]

Child of the 7th Age, I agreed with some of your post but there are a couple of things I disagree with.

PJ's changes do not "improve" the book; they merely take away from the integrity of the story. Frodo and Faramir are two cases in point, which I won't get into because these have been discussed to death down in Movies.

I do not agree that the changes to Frodo or Faramir hurt the story and since I have found others with the same view I do not think that this is a universal viewpoint.

Let me approach this as an historian, which I am. Tolkien is writing about warfare before the modern era. The kind of war you describe in the paragraph above simply did not come into existence until the technology was there to support it.

If you are a historian then I hope you do realise that the things I talked about did in fact happend throughout the history of warfare and conquest. Just because the scale may have been smaller it does mean that this did not happen.

Whilst the Bible may not be a historically accurate record of events, the manner of warfare it often depicts in the Old Testament was not unusual. This often involved wiping out the other tribe.

Take a look at Boudica's revolt in Britain to see that warfare was not 'clean'.

Or at what happened to the cities of Troy and Carthage.

Or what happened to cities that tried to fight the Mongol hordes.

Or the aforementioned Crusades.

Cromwell's campaigns in Ireland.

The conquest of the new world and in particular, Latin America.

Leading right up until the modern era. One thing they all show is that inhumanity to man is not new, or confined to the modern era of war.
Racial and religious intolerance, mistreatment of women and children, the obliteration of other cultures...
They have all been around for as long as we have and the more sanitised depiction of warfare in LOTR is not realistic.

His model (also his training) was "mythological" -- the old epics focus on individuals and their fate rather than depicting deaths on a massive scale.

So focused on the individuals in fact that they were all paper-thin depictions.