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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Gez" data-source="post: 48541" data-attributes="member: 1328">If you look at it, Middle Earth has factories also. In fact, it is a somewhat medieval world that is undergoing an industrial revolution at the same time as the war of the ring.It was well illustrated in the movie: look at what Isengard became... And then, Saruman do the same thing to the Shire, cutting trees and building big ugly mills and factories.JRR Tolkien was sometimes charged of being a luddite. Indeed, the main force for technological progress is evil and the orcs (funny when you consider that all non-tolkien orcs have a "technology" much less advanced than other races) and the main force for good are all people stuck in their traditions and ancestral way of life. In fact, Tolkien, like Cervantes (remember Don Quixote fighting against windmills ? Although this may be taken for a comical scene, it has the symbolic of old-school chivalry struggling against modernism and machine; and ultimately losing) but with a different tone, describe the end of an age and the beginning of a new one. The age to come is the age of Man, and of Machine. The elve, unable to adapt to the change, leave and flee to the intemporal Valinor. The orcs stays. They'll eventually merge fully with humans (Saruman was the first to create human/orc hybrid, even if Peter Jackson strangely decided to make the Uruk-Hai orc/goblin hybrids -- I could swear orcs and goblins are synonyms in the books !), and this will result in the man of today, petty, egoist, concerned only by power and money. With this books, Tolkien said that all these industries that raped the peaceful landscapes and polluted the atmosphere was depriving the world of its elves and its magic, turning it into a harsh, orcish world.Technology exist, but is used by the villains.</blockquote>

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