That is the one thing that always bugged me about LOTR, it just didn't feel like a realistic medieval society, but like something constructed or something a religion is founded on.
Considering Prof. T was on a mission to create a mythology for England, that is kind of expected...
You have to remember that LOTR began as a sequel to
The Hobbit, which in turn was indeed supposed to be a children's book set in a world of its own. The references to Tolkien's "serious" mythological work (
The Silmarillion, which he began in the trenches of the Great War but never finished) were meant only as an insider joke for those who had been exposed to his unpublished stuff. Having started to work on LOTR, Tolkien came up with the idea of placing the story at the very end of his imagined history - in fact, to use the story to explain how the world of
The Silmarillion became the world we live in - and thus retconned
The Hobbit into the same world as well. Unfortunately, the Shire had been quite explicitly defined for what it was (fortunately at least the elves and trolls, even Gollum, got a far more serious treatment), so instead of re-imagining the Shire Tolkien simply wrote the text so that it would gradually transform from a harmless fairytale into a proper epic fantasy during the first volume.
Not that the other realms of Middle-Earth are any more realistic, or that their descriptions would be any more streetwise or less idealistic, because that simply does not fit in the style of heroic epic, but at least they don't feel as much out of place since they are inspired by medieval realms. (Gondor is pretty much Byzantium and Rohan is pre-Norman England, just with cavalry.)
And yes, I havent read LoTR, so I apologize if I stepped on anyones toes. I was simply going off the fact that there are wizards, dwarfs, elves, and the like. I do intend to read them some day soon...
Yes, LOTR is pretty much high fantasy, with all sorts of fancy creatures, but nevertheless Middle-Earth has very little in the way of
magic, which was my point.
"Magic", in the sense how it is understood in fantasy literature, can be only practiced in Middle-Earth by
valar and
maiar (demigods/"angels"/whatever that usually assume humanoid shape) and by objects created by them (aka the Rings of Power by Sauron). As of the time of LOTR, only Sauron, five wizards, and the Balrog remain of their kind, the rest have already passed into the spirit realm. Even for these createures, magic is not something that is done casually or without some serious preparation, and even a simple trick is very taxing on the user.
There is "situational magic", in the sense that nature, things, etc. can have seemingly impossible properties (eg. most of all Elven-made stuff and their lands, and the groovy voice-activated doors of Khazad-Dum), but nobody is making any spells to cause that or most likely does not even understand why things are the way they are - they just are. Also, people may have innate, seemingly supernatural abilities (eg. Aragorn's healing hands) but again, this is their "fate", not something that you purposefully learn, or something you cause to happen by doing something, and is usually quite subtle.
In addition,
words themselves have tremendous power in Tolkien's world, even when voiced out by a completely random layman. This ties in with Tolkien's interest in Finnish mythology - the Finns of old believed that by knowing the true name (or to be even more thorough, by reciting the tale of its birth) of something, you could gain control over it. Saying the real name of a living thing could actually summon it, eg. you never referred to "bear" as such, but with a wild variety of euphemisms. So when in Middle-Earth you scream the name of the goddess of the moon and the stars, that really hurts the creatures of the darkness.
