Tolkien and that eucatastrophe thing
[Cross-posted from the Henneth-Annun mailing list, in case it looks familiar]
With head well and truly in Middle-earth, a question (well, two linked ones, really) which started off as a very minor plot aside for the next chapter of my Endless LoTR Beta Fic but has now seriously wormed its way under my skin:
What sort of levels of casualties are the Armies of the West likely to have taken at the Black Gate? And what would they have done, afterwards, with their dead?...
The 6000 or so remaining to Aragorn by the time they got there were hideously outnumbered, but they were drawn up in a defensive formation on the two hills, since Aragorn's main aim by the time the Black Gate opened was to keep Sauron's attention and his troops tied up as long as possible; so they would have been making it as difficult as they could for Mordor to take them down. It's also not clear (to me, at any rate, and I think maybe deliberately on JRRT's part) how much time elapses between the beginning of the battle and the coming of the Eagles: could be hours (in which case they must have taken heavy losses) or could be mere minutes (in which case, perhaps very few)
I was intrigued, when I went back and looked at the text closely, that JRRT never specifically refers to anyone (of the Armies of the West) being killed at all; there's language that implies it (by the time the Eagles arrive "the Captains of the West were foundering in a gathering sea...under the wings of the Nazgul the shadows of death fell dark upon the earth." ) And at the end of "The Field of Cormallen", he says "The weary rested and the hurt were healed.", but adds "For some had laboured and fought much with the remnants of the Easterlings and the Southrons, until all were subdued." - as though the battle before the Black Gate itself, up to the moment the towers fall, wouldn't itself account for casualties.
But even to contemplate the possibility that nobody died, even if the battle only in fact lasted minutes, I find a huge stretch - they ought to be losing men in the front rank at quite a rate: at the end of "The Black Gate Opens", just before Pippin kills his troll, the hill-trolls "broke upon the line of the men of Gondor, and beat upon helm and head, and arm and shield, as smiths hewing the hot bending iron". They knock Beregond out, and I can't believe they wouldn't have killed a good many others.
And yet.. no mention at all by JRRT of anything worse than wounded who can be healed on the Field of Cormallen; no roll-call of the dead (unlike after the Pelennor), no mention of burials or any other form of rites.
(Which does beg the practical question: assuming for a moment the Armies of the West did take losses, what would they have done with their dead? I cannot think for a moment they would have wanted to bury them in the Black Lands, if they could possibly avoid it, nor would they have contemplated leaving them for the carrion birds of Mordor; but the sheer logistics of sending back to Cair Andros, if not Osgiliath, for wagons to transport corpses seem unfeasible. All the death-customs of M-E we know about IIRC normally involve burial or entombment, but in this case... funeral pyres?)
So is the non-mention of the dead and disposal of same just one of those practical details JRRT often chooses not to clutter up his epic narrative with (like, say, where in/around Edoras are all the Rohirrim brought in from the Eastemnet when Gandalf and Co arrive there, or why in the description of Frodo and Sam's first view of Cormallen are there no tents, fercryingoutloud?)
Or is there a huge metaphysical/theological point being subtly made here and we are supposed to assume that, in really eucatastrophic fashion, the arrival of the Eagles and the destruction of the Ring are so perfectly timed that no-one dies???
Thoughts? This started off as a very minor plot aside for the upcoming chapter but it is really getting under my skin now and I am wondering if for all those years of re-reading LoTR I have failed to notice something really fundamental; wouldn't be the first time!