alex_greene said:
I've read Moorcock's Wizardry and Wild Romance, too, you know. And The Tough Guide to Fantasyland.
Moorcock makes some good points, but there are a few places where he goues off the deep end. He does correctly diagnose the key weakness of Tolkien's work (i.e. that he engages in a degree of sentimentalism alien to the source material he draws upon and never quite follows the implications of his themes to their logical conclusion), but sometimes his conclusions are way off the mark - it's a bold critic indeed who claims that Tolkien wasn't familiar with the early medieval literature that he draws upon and that he doesn't communicate the horrors of war. Keep in mind that at the heart of Moorcock's criticisms are concerns that Tolkien's work embodies a corrupt middle class morality. And yet Tolkien clearly doesn't approve of comfortable middle class complacency - in the long run the isolationist Hobbits simply cannot cut themselves off from the changes taking place in the wider world and come very close to being enslaved by Saruman. Equating Tolkien's depiction of the Shire with the cloying rural nostalgia of R. F. Delderfield is simply dishonest.
Incidentally, it is possible to write good fantasy from a progressive viewpoint - look at Ursula Le Guin, Elizabeth A Lynn, C.J. Cherryh, China Mieville, J.K. Rowling, or even Andre Norton. Moorcock has written several times that one of his concerns was the uncritical acceptance of conservative authors such as Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, and Robert Heinlen by otherwise progressive people.
As for the Tough Guide to Fantasyland, Diana Wynne Jones is really taking aim at the kind of commodified fantasy that didn't really emerge until the 1980s.
