long defeat

A background feeling of melancholy found in Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, derived from the knowledge that every victory is only temporary, what we hold good will eventually be gone, and that the world is irreversibly changing for the worse, derived from the English/British Catholic sentiment that their world of Catholic hegemony is gone and never to return, crossed with Tolkien's dislike of the changes to England since the Industrial Revolution and during the Twentieth Century.