Moorcock, Mieville & Morgan vs. Tolkien

[Nerdanel]

[b]Background Note[/b]

Moorcock has said the following about [i]The Lord of the Rings[/i] in an [url="http://www.zone-sf.com/mmoorcock.html"]interview[/url]

[quote]I'm not sure I've ever finished it. I know I started skipping early, looking for the little Gollum character, who was the only character in it I could identify with.[/quote]

Keep that quote in mind. It may explain "a little something" about his (in)famous essay, [url="http://www.revolutionsf.com/article.php?id=953"]Epic Pooh[/url], which I'm now going to discuss.

[b]Taking on Epic Pooh[/b]

Moorcock complains at great length about Tolkien's style being too "soft" and how it acts to "console" the reader. He illustrates his point with a short poem he wrote himself and an excerpt from [i]Winnie-the-Pooh[/i]. These he claims are similar in tone to Tolkien's writing. I can't say I particularly agree, but writing styles are never clear-cut things and Moorcock cleverly wrote with enough ambiguity so as to allow for Tolkien passages that do not fit into his view. I would have to quote a significant portion of [i]The Lord of the Rings[/i] and explain why it doesn't meet his definition in order to prove him wrong.

The book is not written all in one style. As it progresses, there is a shift away from a sequel to [i]The Hobbit[/i] and into a more elevated, adult-oriented style that matches the broadening scope of the story itself. In the in-book universe this is justified by the early parts having been written by Bilbo and most of the rest by Frodo.

[quote]While there is an argument for the reactionary nature of the books, they are certainly deeply conservative and strongly anti-urban, which is what leads some to associate them with a kind of Wagnerish hitlerism. I don't think these books are 'fascist', but they certainly don't exactly argue with the 18th century enlightened Toryism with which the English comfort themselves so frequently in these upsetting times. They don't ask any questions of white men in grey clothing who somehow have a handle on what's best for us.[/quote]

For those who have piled on me for Godwin's Law related reasons, here Moorcock is the first to bring up Hitler - and this is the real Hitler, not Terry Goodkind. Granted, Moorcock doesn't actually say Tolkien's works promote Nazism; he rather regards them as more run-of-the-mill rightwing authoritarian - Hitler lite.

But Tolkien does not display uncritical trust to the authorities. There are several instances of good things happening in The Lord of the Rings because someone disobeys direct orders by their superior. Faramir uses personal judgement against Denethor's orders and does not execute the hobbits but aids them on their journey to destroy the One Ring. Éowyn disobeys Théoden, rides into war, and kills the Witch-king. Beregond does not go along with Denethor's murder-suicide plan and as a result Faramir's life is saved.

[quote]I suppose I respond so antipathetically to Lewis and Tolkien because I find this sort of consolatory orthodoxy as distasteful as any other self-serving misanthropic doctrine.[/quote]

This is a curious statement. I for one fail to see any evidence of Tolkien hating humans, let alone in a self-serving way.

[quote]Moderation was the rule and it is moderation which ruins Tolkien's fantasy and causes it to fail as a genuine romance, let alone an epic. The little hills and woods of that Surrey of the mind, the Shire, are "safe", but the wild landscapes everywhere beyond the Shire are "dangerous". Experience of life itself is dangerous.[/quote]

An important point in [i]The Lord of the Rings[/i] is that the Shire is not safe from the turmoils of the world. While the main characters are gone on their quest, the Shire is taken over by Lotho Sackville-Baggins (and later the vengeful Saruman) who keeps it under control by hiring ragtag foreign mercenaries with no emotional bond to the populace. The Shire essentially becomes a client state of Orthanc that produces food for Orthanc's armies while the locals go hungry and oppressed. There is some resistance, but the liberation does not come until the main characters return, now well-armed veterans, and use the experience they gained on their journey to rally the populace to an effective fighting force. Safe comfort is nice while it lasts, but times change, sometimes suddenly.

And furthermore, the wide world contains beauties that the Shire cannot dream of. Lothlórien in particular stands out. Yet Boromir feared to enter the place due to its dangerous reputation, a reputation that has some basis in fact. In response Gandalf reminds that Boromir himself is also dangerous as is the rest of the Fellowship, and Gandalf the most dangerous of them all. Potential for danger is not always a bad thing.

[quote][i]The Lord of the Rings[/i] is much more deep-rooted in its infantilism than a good many of the more obviously juvenile books it influenced. It is Winnie-the-Pooh posing as an epic. If the Shire is a suburban garden, Sauron and his henchmen are that old bourgeois bugaboo, the Mob - mindless football supporters throwing their beer-bottles over the fence the worst aspects of modern urban society represented as the whole by a fearful, backward-yearning class for whom "good taste" is synonymous with "restraint" (pastel colours, murmured protest) and "civilized" behaviour means "conventional behaviour in all circumstances". This is not to deny that courageous characters are found in The Lord of the Rings, or a willingness to fight Evil (never really defined), but somehow those courageous characters take on the aspect of retired colonels at last driven to write a letter to The Times and we are not sure - because Tolkien cannot really bring himself to get close to his proles and their satanic leaders - if Sauron and Co. are quite as evil as we're told. After all, anyone who hates hobbits can't be all bad.[/quote]

Here Moorcock displays a deep misunderstanding of the character of Sauron. Sauron is far from some mindless force of destruction and Chaos Moorcock sees him as. He is a highly intelligent and organized entity who is out to rule the entire world as its god-king, which he already is for a large piece of it. He has instilled torture as a policy, has an economy based on slavery, and has been known to feed useless prisoners to a giant spider just for fun. He has no concern for environmental protection and routinely overrides other people's wills with his magic. The reason his soldiers went into disarray when the Ring was destroyed was that suddenly they weren't mindcontrolled anymore and didn't know how to deal with that.

Incidentally, Sauron has no particular beef against hobbits in general. He would enslave them just because they are there, not out of some grudge.

The good guys are also being misrepresented by Moorcock. Comparing the courage Frodo and Sam portray on their harrowing journey through Mordor to "retired colonels at last driven to write a letter to The Times" vastly over-values writing a letter to the editor. The difference in degree is such that it becomes a difference in kind.

And as for the definition of Evil, I don't know what Moorcock would have liked to see. There are several evil characters who have dialogue and commit evil deeds on the page, including a number of Orcs. Sauron himself stays almost completely in the shadows, but his actions reverberate throughout the story. And I don't think it would have worked very well if Tolkien had paused the story in order to deliver a tell-not-show sermon on his preferred definition of evil.

Moorcock then quotes Tolkien's view that "fairy stories" should have a happy ending and says:

[quote]The great epics dignified death, but they did not ignore it, and it is one of the reasons why they are superior to the artificial romances of which [i]Lord of the Rings[/i] is merely one of the most recent.[/quote]

But the ending of [i]The Lord of the Rings[/i] is bittersweet rather than happy. Sauron is defeated, but Elves are still leaving Middle-earth. The power of the One Ring is gone but so is the power of the Three. Gondor rise again but Lothlórien will fade away for ever. Sam happily marries Rosie but Frodo is broken by his quest. And if we go to Tolkien's other works of fantasy we find stories like [i]The Children of Húrin[/i] the ending of which cannot be regarded as happy by any force of imagination. The explanation is simple: for Tolkien "fairy story" was not a synonym for all fantasy, and he didn't write [i]The Lord of the Rings[/i] as one. Even [i]The Hobbit[/i], the children's book with its happy end that could be counted as a "fairy story", does not ignore death, as not all the characters live to see the end. This includes the crucial character of Thorin, the leader of the quest.

[quote]If I find this nostalgia for a "vanished" landscape a bit strange it is probably because as I write I can look from my window over twenty miles of superb countryside to the sea and a sparsely populated coast. This county, like many others, has seemingly limitless landscapes of great beauty and variety, unspoiled by excessive tourism or the uglier forms of industry. Elsewhere big cities have certainly destroyed the surrounding countryside but rapid transport now makes it possible for a Londoner to spend the time they would have needed to get to Box Hill forty years ago in getting to Northumberland.[/quote]

"Let them eat cake." Tolkien did not portray technology itself as evil, but rather the callous and polluting use of it. Environmental regulations and new, cleaner technology has made things better, but Tolkien would have been old enough to remember the thick coal smoke over London. Even if the workers in such a place have enough spare money to travel on vacations, they wold still have had to spend most of their time living there. Not everyone can have a job as untethered to a place as a novelist.

[quote]I think it is simple neophobia which makes people hate the modern world and its changing society; it is xenophobia which makes them unable to imagine what rural beauty might lie beyond the boundaries of their particular Shire. They would rather read Miss Read and The Horse Whisperer and share a miserable complaint or two on the commuter train while planning to take their holidays in Bournemouth, as usual, because they can't afford to go to Spain this year. They don't want rural beauty anyway; they want a sunny day, a pretty view.[/quote]

There was this Lothlórien, mind you. Ithilien was very pretty too. Minas Tirith had remarkable architecture, and the Glittering Caves of Aglarond... In fact, it's almost as if Moorcock has had to stop reading The Lord of the Rings early on to miss all of that... Wait, I seem to recall he has said something to that effect...

[quote]Writers like Tolkien take you to the edge of the Abyss and point out the excellent tea-garden at the bottom, showing you the steps carved into the cliff and reminding you to be a bit careful because the hand-rails are a trifle shaky as you go down; they haven't got the approval yet to put a new one in.[/quote]

??? I am rendered speechless by trying to imagine the line of thought that has led to the above paragraph.

This looks as good a place as any to say that Tolkien did not portray the Shire as an utopia and in fact made gentle fun of the hobbits' parochiality. For example, there is a running joke in which various local hobbits talk about how strange are the other local hobbits (who naturally express the same sentiments in reverse) in what amounts to the next major village a little ways off. There are also hobbits that are not good people and others that simply have annoying personalities.

Next follows a lengthy section where C. S. Lewis's writing style is negatively compared to other children's authors. There is little to say here, as Moorcock concentrates on amorphous matters that rely heavily on taste.

[quote]Another variety of book has begun to appear, a sort of Pooh-fights-back fiction of the kind produced by Richard Adams, which substitutes animals for human protagonists, contains a familiar set of middle-class Anglican Tory undertones (all these books seem to be written with a slight lisp) and is certainly already more corrupt than Tolkien.[/quote]

If I can understand Moorcock's line of thought, his main problem seems to be that he cannot conceive a story starring rabbits as having actual tension. He provides an excerpt from [i]Watership Down[/i] featuring a scary beaver as a quote worthy of ridicule. A beaver might be a small animal for humans, but the main characters are not human-sized. They are unarmed rabbit-size rabbits with all the fighting power of a rabbit. I think Moorcock only displays his lack of imagination when he cannot grasp that great epics can be played on a scale that is small to us but vast to the participants. Nations rise and fall in the book, and characters die violent deaths.

And by the way, when I first tried to read [i]Watership Down[/i] as a child I had to stop after Chapter Two due to the nightmares. I would not exactly call that "consolatory". I wonder how much Moorcock has actually read of the book and how much he relies on his negative preconceptions. Normally I would not question in such way, but Moorcock has already admitted not to have read [i]The Lord of the Rings[/i] all the way through, which casts a shadow on his reliability as a critic.

Next Moorcock claims that Tolkien produced "unwholesome" "corrupted romanticism" (although not as thoroughly corrupted as Lewis and Adams) and that he "betrayed the romantic discipline" most of all authors. He doesn't provide any new supporting arguments, so we might as well move on.

[quote]Lin Carter, in his [i]Imaginary Worlds[/i] - the only book I have been able to find on the general subject of epic fantasy - uses an argument familiar to those who are used to reading apologies from that kind of sf or thriller buff who feels compelled to justify his philistinism[/quote]

Moorcock piles on Lin Carter which is sad as poor Lin Carter is not exactly known for his great writing abilities, to say the least. He is not very well known for anything anymore either. Considering that Epic Pooh has been updated twice after the Seventies, I'd think Moorcock would have been able to find a more competent defender of escapism to attack.

Moorcock mentions David Lindsay's book [i]A Voyager to Arcturus[/i]. My copy of that book has Moorcock's endorsement on the back cover, so one would think this would be a book Moorcock knew and understood well.

[quote]Like so many of his colleagues in the professional sf world, Carter expresses distaste for fiction which is not predominantly escapist by charging it with being "depressing" or "negative" if it does not provide him with the moral and psychological comforts he seems to need. An unorthodox view, such as that of Tolkien's contemporary David Lindsay ([i]Voyage to Arcturus[/i]), is regarded as a negative view. This, of course, is the response of those deeply and often unconsciously wedded to their cultural presumptions, who regard examination of them as an attack.[/quote]

Ironically enough, [i]A Voyage to Arcturus[/i] is a difficult and philosophical book after thinking about which for a while I came to a conclusion that it espouses the view much like the one Moorcock so hates and ascribes to Tolkien. I think Lindsay is making a Christian allegory about the dangers of spiritual searching and saying that people should consider that they may have been born to the Truth as children of Christians in a Christian country and should not risk their souls by venturing into the occult, which is not exactly unorthodox. I believe an unorthodox Gnostic interpretation of the book, which Moorcock seems to have made, relies on the assumption that the Devil character would not lie. A fuller exploration of this matter deserves a thread of its own, so I'll cut my argument short. If someone wishes to dispute me they're welcome to it.

The next subject of Moorcock's ire is a now-old fantasy anthology that dares to call its contents "good literature" while including stories by authors Moorcock doesn't like and ignoring the authors Moorcock likes - and apparently also Moorcock himself. This leads Moorcock into making a sweeping proclamation about those English fantasy writers that are held in esteem by American fantasy writers:

[quote]The crux of the thing remains: the writers admired are not "literary" or "literate".[/quote]

Moorcock manages to offend both sides of the Atlantic on that one. He then proceeds to tell how horrible it is that Tolkien gets elevated on the level of the mainstream classics and says that is a "sign of our dumber times". He completely ignores the possibility that he might have overlooked literary depths seen by others or that the parts he skipped might possibly have contained something profound.

On Tolkienish fantasy in general, Moorcock finishes his essay:

[quote]To pretend that this addictive cabbage is anything more than the worst sort of pulp historical romance or western is, however, a depressing sign of our intellectual decline and our free-falling academic standards.[/quote]

Moorcock cleverly declines to mention the exact which works by which additional authors he is aiming the above at and which he's not. This means he is safe from counterclaims about a particular author's value as well as arguments that he hasn't read enough in the genre to judge it in its entirety. It is entirely possible that if he were to reveal those facts his argument would fall apart for all to see. I would not ordinarily insinuate in such a way, but, as I have said, there is the little fact of him not having read through - or, seemingly, more than a fraction of - the book he tries to psychoanalyze in print.

[Mister Manticore]

How did the Shire end up though?

[Werthead]

We're going over Moorcock's roundly-discredited attack on Tolkien again? Surely that's a dead horse that's been abused too much already?

When it comes to modern SF&F authors, I think Gene Wolfe's [url="http://home.clara.net/andywrobertson/wolfemountains.html"]comments on Tolkien[/url] are far more worthy of attention.

[Anatole Kuragin]

Someone bashing Tolkien that's never read his stuff? Immmmmmpossssssssssssibbbblllleeee!

[Lightsnake]

Good show, Nerdanel!

Yeah, we all know Moorcock's a bitter old baby, but it's nice to see someone take it to him point by point.

[alguien]

I've never read Wolfe's essay on Tolkien before. Thanks for the link, it is really is quite good.

With regard to Moorcock, I find it amusing that he used the term "Wagnerish hitlerism" to describe Tolkien's work. In the book of Tolkien's letters, the one time he comes close to swearing (he uses the word "ruddy", I believe) is in a letter to his son describing his anger at how Hitler has taken the Wagnerian myths and corrupted them to some vision of a master race in Nazi propaganda.

I've read some of the Elric books and was less than impressed. Pulpy, simple, not very well written. I've heard some of his other series are better, but don't really have the urge to read. I half suspect in generations to come he'll be remembered as an outspoken SF/F critic of Tolkien, and little else.

[Plessiez]

[quote name='Nadie' post='1467901' date='Aug 4 2008, 18.45']I've read some of the Elric books and was less than impressed. ... I half suspect in generations to come he'll be remembered as an outspoken SF/F critic of Tolkien, and little else.[/quote]
Wait, I'm having trouble keeping up here.

Moorcock attacking Tolkien despite admitting he'd never bothered to read the majority of his work makes him a clueless loser, but [i]we[/i] can dismiss the entirety of Moorcock's work on the basis of reading a fragment of his output? I want to make sure that I get this right :unsure:.

[Anatole Kuragin]

The DC to dismiss literature has a -10 modifier when the guy's name is "moorcock".

[Wyatt]

[quote name='Anatole Kuragin' post='1467960' date='Aug 4 2008, 14.37']The DC to dismiss literature has a -10 modifier when the guy's name is "moorcock".[/quote]

And the base DC was 10 to begin with. I'd have to roll a dBlackHole to fail that one.

[alguien]

[quote name='Plessiez' post='1467956' date='Aug 4 2008, 13.31']Wait, I'm having trouble keeping up here.

Moorcock attacking Tolkien despite admitting he'd never bothered to read the majority of his work makes him a clueless loser, but [i]we[/i] can dismiss the entirety of Moorcock's work on the basis of reading a fragment of his output? I want to make sure that I get this right :unsure:.[/quote]

I can post an assumption after having read three Elric books, his "most popular" work, found it lacking, and make a logical guess as to his literary legacy. Not really reaching there. Don't understand whats so hard to follow.

[Ahimsa]

Nerdanel clearly put a lot of time into the post and makes a lot of valid points.

Moorcock was always more into the Howard/Burroughs flavor of fantasy than the Tolkien variant.
Moorcock isn't a bad writer--Gloriana was pretty decent, and I like the Oswald Bastable stuff--but his prose will never be mistaken for anything ... good.

[b][color="#ff0000"]EDITED TO REMOVE INSULTING COMMENTS.[/color][/b]

[Plessiez]

[quote name='Nadie' post='1468007' date='Aug 4 2008, 20.50']I can post an assumption after having read three Elric books, his "most popular" work, found it lacking, and make a logical guess as to his literary legacy. Not really reaching there. Don't understand whats so hard to follow.[/quote]
Er, just so we're clear, nothing you said was actually "hard to follow". That was what's called a rhetorical device on my part.

Quite simply, there's nothing "logical" about your guess as to Moorcock's literary legacy, because it's quite clearly not in keeping with any of the actual facts. A writer who has won the Nebula Award, the World Fantasy Award and the SFWA Grand Master award - to say nothing of the later authors he has influenced - isn't going to turn out to have no literary legacy to speak of simply because you didn't care for a few of his less critically-acclaimed works, and it's the height of arrogance to assume otherwise.

And for the record, I'm far from a fan of Moorcock and don't really agree with any of his claims in the linked essay - those few that have some merit he carries ludicrously too far. (I'm not particularly enthused about Tolkien either, for that matter, though no doubt this is because despite reading LotR half a dozen times and the Silmarillion twice I wasn't paying enough attention :rolleyes: ).

[alguien]

[quote name='Plessiez' post='1468101' date='Aug 4 2008, 15.52']Er, just so we're clear, nothing you said was actually "hard to follow". That was what's called a rhetorical device on my part.

Quite simply, there's nothing "logical" about your guess as to Moorcock's literary legacy, because it's quite clearly not in keeping with any of the actual facts. A writer who has won the Nebula Award, the World Fantasy Award and the SFWA Grand Master award - to say nothing of the later authors he has influenced - isn't going to turn out to have no literary legacy to speak of simply because you didn't care for a few of his less critically-acclaimed works, and it's the height of arrogance to assume otherwise.

And for the record, I'm far from a fan of Moorcock and don't really agree with any of his claims in the linked essay - those few that have some merit he carries ludicrously too far. (I'm not particularly enthused about Tolkien either, for that matter, though no doubt this is because despite reading LotR half a dozen times and the Silmarillion twice I wasn't paying enough attention :rolleyes: ).[/quote]

Yeah, just so I'm being clear, I got it was a rhetorical device, I responded in kind because I thought it was dumb.

Sorry, the reading world at large doesn't know who many of the Nebulas and World Fantasy Awards winners are. A hell of a lot more readers know who Tolkien is than Moorcock. However, when looking over literary criticisms of Tolkien, Moorcock's essay is always featured prominently. Hence, its not arrogance, only a guess (note that I said "half suspect") that many years from now, he will be primarily known as a SF/F author who critiqued LOTR. Over the centuries literary trends have come and gone and mainly only the best authors have been remembered. I don't think Moorcock comes anywhere close to being the best.

[Brude]

I never got the love for Moorcock's writing, at least based on what I've read (the Elric stuff). I found it lacking in any emotion and felt no connection to any character in it at all. Tolkein: quite the opposite reaction.

Technically, I suppose, Moorcock's writing was strong but beyond that I can't say much for it. It doesn't stick with me at all, I think a week after I read his stuff I was already beginning to forget it. In fact while reading it, my feeling was that I only wanted to finish it out of a sense that I had to, because he was such a big name in the fantasy genre, of which I presumed to be some sort of an expert or aficianado.

[PhelanArcetus]

[quote name='Lothor Apple Eater' post='1468027' date='Aug 4 2008, 16.02']Don't be a dick, Werthead. Nerdanel clearly put a lot of time into the post and makes a lot of valid points.

Moorcock was always more into the Howard/Burroughs flavor of fantasy than the Tolkien variant.
Moorcock isn't a bad writer--Gloriana was pretty decent, and I like the Oswald Bastable stuff--but his prose will never be mistaken for anything ... good.[/quote]

I'm pretty sure that I saw him bashing Howard in the foreword to the Elric collection I picked up a couple of months ago.

Incidentally, I had bought it because Moorcock was being described as one of the classic authors... and I was highly dissatisfied with the work. Not only was the prose not especially inspired, but I consistently found myself frustrated with how the protagonist spent his time being told what to do by someone else. His deep tortured battle with the sword... I didn't care.

Howard wrote with a vibrant simplicity. Tolkien wrote with a brilliant eye to the evocative and poetical prose. Moorcock... I have nothing good to say about his writing, nor his attitude.

[Larry.]

Did you read Moorcock's essay in English? I'm asking because of odd misquotes. I'll supply one:

[quote]I suppose I respond so antipathetically to Lewis and Tolkien because I find this sort of consolatory [b]Christianity[/b] distasteful, [b]a fundamentally misanthropic doctrine.[/b][/quote]

Moorcock was discussing something a bit different than what your quote and the following comments suggest. But to continue:

[quote]One should perhaps feel some sympathy for the nervousness occasionally revealed beneath their thick layers of stuffy self-satisfaction, typical of the second-rate schoolmaster, but sympathy is hard to sustain in the teeth of their hidden aggression which is so often accompanied by a deep-rooted hypocrisy. Their theories dignify the mood of a disenchanted and thoroughly discredited section of the repressed English middle-class too afraid, even as it falls, to make any sort of direct complaint ("They kicked us out of Rhodesia, you know") least of all to the Higher Authority, their Anglican God who has evidently failed them.[/quote]

Moorcock was talking about how the idea of "consolation" is a rather insulting one for those who are not steeped in the notion that humans are a "fallen race." Consolation for what? That is pretty much the source of Moorcock's ire there.

In regards to the "safe"/"unsafe" divide, what are the attitudes of the Hobbits to all of this? Is it related to the basic attitudes of the majority of the characters towards Rhûn and Harad, outside of Sam's single soliloquy? Quite a few people, not just Moorcock, have leveled the charge that if not racist, Tolkien's writings reflect a rather limited worldview that indicates more of a distrust of the unfamiliar than of the WASP home groups. Whether or not one personally agrees with it, there is something to that charge that has to be considered. And let's see more of what Moorcock has to say on this issue:

[quote]I think it is simple neophobia which makes people hate the modern world and its changing society; it is xenophobia which makes them unable to imagine what rural beauty might lie beyond the boundaries of their particular Shire. They would rather read R.F. Delderfield and share a miserable complaint or two on the commuter train while planning to take their holidays in boumemouth, as usual, because they can't afford to go to Spain this year. They don't want rural beauty anyway; they want a sunny day, a pretty view.

Writers like Tolkien take you to the edge of the Abyss and point out the excellent tea-garden at the bottom, showing you the steps carved into the cliff and reminding you to be a bit careful because the hand-rails are a trifle shaky as you go down; they haven't got the approval yet to put a new one in.[/quote]

And that last paragraph touches upon the second main deficiency of Tolkien in Moorcock's opinion, that his prose is a bit too exacting, a bit too "controlling," it doesn't, as Moorcock says in regards to Lewis as well as Tolkien, "show me the respect I was used to from Nesbit or Richmal Crompton." And considering that the essay was on a certain type of "children's literature" (or perhaps YA today, as some might be inclined to rate even LotR), his focus centers around the notion of "patronizing" readers, children or not, and while many may or may not agree with it (the Narnia stories didn't read well for me as I aged), it is a valid argument to make.

Don't really have much else to say but I disagree and am moving on because I'm a bit too tired from work right now to think of anything else! :P

[Mister Manticore]

So, Moorcock, Tolkien, Thunderdome.

Argument over.

[Nerdanel]

In my experience Epic Pooh isn't nearly discredited enough, and the first quote isn't exactly famous. I've never seen anyone make the connection and I felt it needed to be done. I tried to write a good solid debunking and keep my snarking at a reasonable level so as not to provide easy openings for Moorcock fans. I'm very tired now...

[quote name='Mister Manticore']:How did the Shire end up though?[/quote]

I'm not sure what you're after, but anyway in the book (the movie cuts out the whole thing) after Saruman and Wormtongue die, the hobbits set to rebuilding the Shire, including planting new trees on the places of those that had been cut. After the end of the actual narrative Aragorn sets the Shire aside as a special area reserved for hobbits and the growing hobbit population leads to the settling of the Tower Hills in the west. Times are good.

Nothing lasts forever though. Since Middle-earth is supposed to be our Earth in the distant past, at some point the Shire came to an unspecified end and the land was subsequently settled by humans, like everywhere else. Hobbits switched to lives of stealth and secrecy and became sources for fairy tales.

[Larry.]

I think Moorcock's beard would triumph.

[Nerdanel]

Dylanfanatic: My quotes are copy-pasted verbatim from behind the link I gave. That version of Epic Pooh has been revised twice and is presumably the most current version. If you are using Wizardry and Wild Romance, that has a less-revised version according to my link.

I can't look at your specific points right now as I'm very tired and have to go to sleep. Replying properly will have to wait until tomorrow.