Climbing the Highest Mountain.

Being something of an anti-war advocate, I’ve wondered why I find the battle scenes in Lord of the Rings so stirring. The answer, I suppose, is because they’re not realistic in a this-world sense. If you want to see something approaching realism, you’d be better off watching Luc Besson’s 1999 film Jeanne D’Arc, in which exhausted mediaeval soldiers struggle through an unholy mess of blood, mud and disembodied limbs, while fallen men cry for the merciful release of death. It’s a really nasty film, because real war is a really nasty business.

Lord of the Rings is a fantasy in which the battle scenes are not about portraying the reality of war, but about invoking the hero archetype. They’re about the human spirit (and elves and dwarves may be generically so categorised in this context) being taken beyond the point of reason to a place of willing self-sacrifice. They’re about laying the very nature of personal existence on the line in order to create a better world for themselves and those who follow, and all at the expense of nothing more than the bad guys. Real war has a habit of revealing psychopaths on both sides. In Lord of the Rings, the psychopaths are all on the side of the enemy.

The battle scenes in Lord of the Rings are about good men and women engaging in the ultimate adventure – pushing themselves courageously through a demon-strewn hell in order to reach the light, alive or dead. There are those in this world who do just that, and that’s why I find them stirring. Fantasy might be less realistic in a mundane sense, but that doesn't mean it's any less real.