"The World Has Changed...I Can Smell It in the Trees, I Can Feel It in the Air...Some Things That Were ARE No Longer, Some Things ARE That Once Were Not...Some Things That Should Not Have Been, Have Been Forgotten. History Has Become Myth, Myth Has Become Legend": So Spake 'the Lady Galadriel' at the Outset of the 2002 Cinematic Interpretation of the First Book in 'The Lord of the Rings' Trilogy, 'The Fellowship of the Ring'...
And so, in this complex, multifaceted and multidimensional tale set in the backwash of and partly inspired by J R R Tolkien's (and close friends') experiences in the trenches of World War 1, we hear an echo of the 'new world' we're all waking up into today, where we are told we'll need to adjust to 'the new normal', whatever that means and will ultimately be...
Curiously and coincidentally enough, a brave new world so to speak itself bearing remarkable resonances with if not actual echoes of the new world Tolkien himself experienced in the not so long ago, and one - like his - affected irrevocably by events surrounding that selfsame epic war...
Though truth be told, the actual death rate now being racked up across our globe from covid-19 is *nothing like that of the post-WW1 'Spanish Flu', which sent many tens of millions to a premature grave...
After (really Afore)Thought: Yet when first hearing the above words (from the first of the Lord of the Rings film trilogy), I found it a classic description, not of the then two decades off Coronavirus pandemic presently besetting our globe, but the climate crisis only just then gaining considerable attention on the world scene...
Curiously and coincidentally enough, a brave new world so to speak itself bearing remarkable resonances with if not actual echoes of the new world Tolkien himself experienced in the not so long ago, and one - like his - affected irrevocably by events surrounding that selfsame epic war...
Though truth be told, the actual death rate now being racked up across our globe from covid-19 is *nothing like that of the post-WW1 'Spanish Flu', which sent many tens of millions to a premature grave...
After (really Afore)Thought: Yet when first hearing the above words (from the first of the Lord of the Rings film trilogy), I found it a classic description, not of the then two decades off Coronavirus pandemic presently besetting our globe, but the climate crisis only just then gaining considerable attention on the world scene...
*Admittedly, 'nothing' now (i.e. as of September 1st, 2021) appears somewhat of an overstatement!
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