[jonnycomputer]

except that when it was enemy men who died, the attitude portrayed in the Lord of the Rings was markedly different. Orcs were Morgoth's primordial perversion of the light. Tolkien, who experienced first hand the horror of the Great War, was no war mongerer. Read his letters.

[gamblor956]

I think the point davidy is going for is that Tolkien was dehumanizing the enemy by making them the "evil other" much in the same way that the Japanese soldiers did. Essentially, by making the enemy into faceless monsters, it's easier to make sport of killing them than it would be if they were men with similar backgrounds and lives as their killers.

Whether you see this as Tolkien glorifying warmongering or him commenting on the psyche of war that made such acts possible is up to each reader to decide.