[The Squatter of Amon Rûdh]

It's all well and good to identify a major source of criticism and point to the tastes of its authors, but since Tolkien refuses to name names, either of the reviewers he was describing or of 'the kinds of writing that they evidently prefer', it's very difficult to pin him down to specific examples of books or authors that he considered inferior. I don't remember reading any comment by Tolkien on any of the 'high modern' authors mentioned above, let alone anything resembling an opinion on them. His only comments on modern literature (in one case, English literature in general) admit an absence of both knowledge and interest, and the most recent writers I find mentioned in his letters are Isaac Asimov and Mary Renault, of whom he approved. Although we might speculate as to which authors and critics were the target for his broadside in the 1966 foreword, there's no indication that Tolkien had even read a book by Joyce or Woolf, let alone decided what he thought of their writing.

I think that Tolkien intended his comments to be taken personally by a few reviewers and critics who had been particularly scathing about The Lord of the Rings. 'What they think is immaterial to me,' says Tolkien, 'because I have no desire to write the sort of rubbish that appeals to them.' This isn't a precise indication of Tolkien's literary tastes, but pure defensive aggression. He may well have disliked modern literature (actually his attitude towards it seems to have been closer to indifference), but as far as his actual words are concerned, his statement comes across simply as a counter-blow in print against the people who had been most contemptuously critical of his own work. Perhaps more completely than any other line in the later foreword, this gives away its true nature as the author's response to his work's reception, and by no means is it an apologia.