Stephanos, your post was very astute and a good summary. Thanks. I agree with you. It draws me back to Kalessin's original question.
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But this is my question - are there any valid criticisms? Of Tolkien, or other leaders of the genre - or of the genre itself, is it by definition limiting and lowbrow (I don't believe that). Or, in the end, is it us - the readers - that make it what it is? After all, we're the ones who keep publishers in business.
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Tolkien had a unique gift. He was the closest thing to a bard I can think of. Here's what he had going for him IMHO: excellent sense of story; a poet's gift for the music of words; a keen imagination; a love for things Northern; the philologist's craft for knowing the bones, tendons, ligaments, and muscles of words; Catholicism (I am not one but do follow Christ but have little patience with or use for the formal religion called Christianity); personal experience of life not yet overwhelmed by The Machine; integrity; a sorrowful awareness of the end of the pre-modern era and a deep desire to preserve it in some way.
It seems to me that if you take away any one of these elements, Tolkien could not have written LOTR. LOTR (to paraphrase Birdland), transcends the genre of fantasy - it is literature. Tolkien evoked the premodern world which he loved, wrote that love right into LOTR, and equated evil with its end.
The Scouring of the Shire puts this in bold relief. Saruman has turned the Shire from preindustrial beauty to industrial (and fascist) ugliness, and Tolkien makes sure we see this as evil; and the Four Travelers who return things to the way they had always been are the good guys.
Tolkien was, after a fashion, a very, very good taxidermist (I think I can hear some growlings out there [img]smilies/eek.gif[/img] ). It's not the best analogy but I really believe that this is a large part of what Tolkien was doing and why he was so successful with the 60s cultural revolution generation and continues to be into the postmodern era.
Postmodernism's reaction against modernism is in part disillusionment that modernism failed to deliver the goods it claimed it could by means of its science and its machines. Therefore one of the escapes from empty modernism that postmodernists are finding is Tolkien and Middle Earth.
Nothing in the fantasy genre is doing any of this. By and large it is entertainment which
has compromised with, or accepted the modern era whereas Tolkien was trying to do precisely what his elves in Lorien were doing all through the 3rd age, preserving the life and beauty of the past. LOTR is art, fraught with the sadness of something lost that can never be regained, whereas most of the fantasy genre is entertainment.
[ April 09, 2002: Message edited by: littlemanpoet ]