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A Catholic, and happily married?! Egad! Get him out of here!!
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The lady reported that Catholics were put down in Tolkien's presence at Oxford (by his peers), at least on one memorable occasion. Charming.
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Well, I attend an urban university, so there are, of course, plenty of "scholars" and "academics" here. My little sarcastic outburst above, sadly, represents most of them fairly well. Anything that so much as hints at morality, anything that mentions that there is right and wrong, anything that seems to support standard moral beliefs (eg marriage), and anything that is not controversial to the mainstream crowd is looked down upon.
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I am not sure that the issue was so much "morality," as it was a standard cliché that applies to writers overall, that Tolkien didn't fit.
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Academia seems to be, from what I've seen all my life, controlled by individuals who are so far out to the left side of things that they are mere specks on the edge of sight. I think the acceptance of Tolkien would be greatly accelerated if some folks who were a bit more level headed filled the ranks of the academic elite.
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Level-headedness? Hm, but that would be
boring. [img]smilies/wink.gif[/img] I think the issue is not so much leftism, as it is general snobbery, the kind that has some academics saying that "Shakespeare was an alias! Nobody with so little of an education could
possibly have written all those plays!" Just like Bernard-Henri Lévy is "dumb" because he looks good, and Tolkien is "for children" because his works include dragons, and whatnot.