Say what you will about the politics of A Song of Ice and Fire, ‘a feudal army marching through the countryside doesn’t become any less horrific, abuse-filled and starvation-causing for the local peasantry just because they’re the Good Guys’ is really a point that like 90% of epic fantasy that’s trying have any sort of serious/coherent morality could stand to learn.
Been (slowly) reading the Wolf series and recently re-read the Witcher series, both of which shined a light on that exact topic. Both had commanders go “we want the local peasantry to like us and not be mad we’re marching through their farms so no raping or pillaging and try to stay on the roads” and their soldiers went “okay got it boss” and then proceeded to completely terrorize the local peasantry. Often to their downfall because it makes it really easy to get the local peasantry to say “hey actually fuck these guys even if they’re technically on our side” when The Good Guys are acting like your typical army doing Army Things.
As much as I do love stories like LOTR where The Good Guys Would Never and anyone that does is Actually Secretly A Bad Guy, the former is definitely more realistic.
(Image ID: tags from user doberbutts that read: the difference is Tolkien was a soldier and sapkoswi watched his country put itself back together after a fascist steamrolled it. Tolkien says war is horrible but the good and moral and just soldiers would never do such a thing. Sapkowski says war is horrible and there is no such thing as a good and moral and just soldier. End image ID.)
Lmk if you want me to delete your tags, but I thought they were too good to pass by.
I also think this lines up with something I saw another user post recently along the lines of how lotr is a response to the cultural paradigm after the Great War, but asoiaf is a response to the paradigm of the Vietnam War, hence the tone difference. Mesh that with the Tolkien’s identity as a soldier, vs the (for good reason) anti war movement of grrm’s generation, and yup. (Someone left a similar comment in the notes too)
Oh no you can keep those up I’m flattered.
Witcher/Sapkowski to add to that is WWII, he was born in 1948 and so would have grown up watching a fractured country try to rebuild… well, damn near everything. In his books it’s very clear that really it doesn’t matter what army it is, militaries are not good things and war is hellish and horrific no matter whose “side” you’re on or what morals you claim to espouse.
LOTR/Tolkien is all the Great War, where war is shocking and terrible and filled with dread and dispair and the lives lost are too many to count and each of them tragic and avoidable. But, also, the Good Guys Would Never, only Bad Guys do things like that. And maybe Tolkien’s specific troupe was made up of Good Guys Who Would Never. Who knows.
ASOIAF/GRRM and the Vietnam War and being an objector while living in a country in a war that he hates the very principal of… yeah, of course, that’s why all the people making military decisions are written to be Like That, and all the soldiers are also written Like That. War is a terrible and grotesque thing. It makes people into monsters. It encourages the very worst in a human being. If you think your Good Guy Army isn’t performing war crimes casually as they march where they need to go, you’re an idiot and you practically deserve to be war crimed.
All three are anti-war statements made in reaction to the aftermath of various wars. Unfortunately pop media focuses on the cool battle scenes and not on the “war is bad and should be avoided as much as possible” message surrounding them.
Tolkien’s war also offered a lot fewer opportunities to despoil parts of the countryside that weren’t the exact bit you were trapped in as it became a slice of hell. Like. In comparison.
But also the lotr setup is genuinely better for Good Guys Would Never (in the opposite direction from wwi lol) than the scenarios grrm and sapkowski are designing, because the good guy armies are literally at home for most of the story–the closest to heroic 'away’ armies we really see are the Rohirrim a-horse making double time cross-country to the place next door, the small band of Rangers going south if you want to call that an army, and the various technically-volunteer citizen levies of Gondor coming to relieve Minas Tirith, some of them upriver by pirate ship at the last minute.
And then the feint to the gates of Mordor but there’s nothing left to despoil along that route by then, the orcs just came through. A lot of the route isn’t even inhabited normally.
This is a short-term deployment over territory you are actively defending, as warrior-aristocrats and citizen-soldiers of the place being defended, and everyone spends all these mobilizations in a hurry to get someplace to defend it. That’s not a recipe for the kind of pillaging you see in with a professional army occupying territory, or moving over hostile territory needing to supplement your supply lines.
You don’t have the motive and you don’t have the time, and you don’t have the degree of alienation from your surroundings that makes pillage endemic in early-modern armies of the kind the Witcher is explicitly depicting and asoiaf trends toward.
Sure he’s still idealizing a good bit, but not as far as the contrast suggests because it’s a different psychological and economic situation.
Whether the warrior-aristocracy and guards of Gondor and so forth tend to abuse their power over the public on an everyday basis is another realm of issue and tone, but it’s mostly separate from the cost of waging war.
Additionally-
In LOTR, the thing you are alienated from is your enemy. And that’s what I think Tolkien got out of the Great War; a war of powerful machines and people trying to kill you who you never see. You never talk; you never make strange eye contact when they die, or step on them, or _anything_. And they chose this; they chose these weapons, and these terms. LOTR is borderline lovecraftian, in that the bad guys are incomprehensible and even more strangely, appear to have made allies of people you might have otherwise found comprehensible (the southrons, etc).
Fun fact! The Great War was the first war in europe where, in order to actually move forward in battles, you could not stand next to your fellows and walk, or run, in formation, to the other guys. You didn’t line up and shoot. Not that we really understood that at first. The war started with machine guns killing tens of thousands of scared men who just wanted to keep their Sam, next to them, from dying.
So the escapism in LOTR says “let’s imagine that way- the old way, where the curtain wall isn’t just pounded to rubble by artillery miles away, where a dwarf and an elf standing side by side didn’t just make dwarf-elf-mud-stew but actually matters. It would be better, if it were like that. It would be a nice escape.”
and also,
“But the hero doesn’t win the war by being brave. The hero wins by being good at hiding and wanting to go home very badly.”
Which is, you know. The only kind of person who actually came home from the Great War. A hobbits instincts are to avoid being seen, and stay in cover. Thousands of Aragons and Boromirs and Eowyns died bravely, and died quickly. Only the hobbits ever came home.
