tolkien

Calling Tolkien himself a fascist is quite a few bridges too far for me.

This was pretty much the final straw for the couple of newsgroups that I loved dearly back in the day (rec.arts.books.tolkien and alt.fan.tolkien).

Moorcock - a much much more inferior artist than asimov, dick, heinlein and tolkien - will never accomplish.

Very interesting reading a review that has to make the case that Tolkien should be taken seriously.

Calling Tolkien a crypto fascist is a bit much — I doubt Tolkien had a fascist agenda — but Tolkien's tacitly assumed worldview is pretty disturbing upon examination.

That might because the author wrote that: > Do I think that Tolkien planned things in this way?

And he's no transient character either, Tolkien later wrote poems about him and he's also mentioned in The Return of the King.

Moorcock is a good writer, but he is definitely much more of a Robert Jordan or RA Salvatore than a Tolkien or Asimov.

The thing about Tolkien we cannot possibly 'get' is the novelty of fantasy in the way he wrote it.

But Tolkien was a man of his time and place and we should appreciate his virtues without ignoring his vices.

Well, the changes in Tolkien books are always to the worse, or restoring the order, but a little worse than it was in the beggining.

I prefer Moorcock than any Tolkiens in the world but make no mistake he is definitly a much inferior writer than Tolkien was.

Tolkien deliberately made Tom an enigma: "And even in a mythical Age there must be some enigmas, as there always are.

He lies." The author fundamentally misunderstands Tom Bombadil, both in terms of where he fits (or doesn't) into Tolkien's mythology, and in terms of Tom's literary purpose.

Part of me loves speculation like this, but the other part of me wonders if the speculators are aware that Tolkien (and authors in general) is/are "just another imperfect human".

> “In Tolkien, everyone’s in their place and happy to be there.

Tolkien may not have been arguing for fascism in his world, but his world had a definite morality and order.

It's not that 'nothing changes' in Tolkien, but that nothing changes for the better.

The closest analog to the Christian God in Tolkien's mythology would be Eru Ilúvatar, I think.