Epic Battle Literature

I have been watching the Lord of the Rings trilogy on television and noticed that literature of epic battles seem to be a mark of our age. Fantasy literature, perhaps the genre most in touch with the modern subconscious, seems to revolve around forces pitted against each other in a way that threatens to destroy or enslave whatever exists. The good of course ends up triumphing over evil and usually introduces an era in which many of the familiar forms give way to the new created out of the fiery crucible of the war. Other examples are the Star Wars Saga, Harry Potter, Christopher Paolini's Inheritance Saga and many others. What they reflect is a subconscious awareness that we are living in age of momentous transition. Politically this has been vocalized in what the conservatives call the "Culture War".

An older order is being replaced by a newer order, but the roots of this conflict reach back hundreds of years and are not shallow or recently conceived. In a nut shell, the conflict is between science/reason and revealed religion. All of the liberation movements from the outlawing of legalized institutional slavery, African-American liberation, to women's liberation to gay rights, are justified on the basis of a scientific view of human life which categorizes each of the people involved as equals. And the conservative forces which have opposed advancements in each of these areas has always pointed back to the Bible as justification for not changing things. And of course, there are many people who have tried to bridge the differences, but as time goes by that tactic seems less attractive. Thus, the modern flowering of the epic battle literature which heakens back to the great myths of past transitional ages such as King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. Like it or not, we are in the midst of great social change.