I found the changes made for the movie version of his book interesting. Reminds me of something Rateliff mentions in Mr Baggins, about a reference to Charles Darwin (a reference to Darwin being 'a young biologist everyone is talking about') was removed from recent US editions of the Dr Dolittle books. Presumably it was felt that even to mention the dreaded name was enough to upset religious sensibilities.
I wonder whether the reason Tolkien's villains are accepted is that the seeting is a fantasy world, & has no obvious direct connection with our own world. Add to that the fact that Tolkien was a man of his time, & there is likely to be less for the loonies to grab onto as a source of offence. Whether Tolkien could get away with what he has done if he was offering LotR for publication today is another question. Of course, as we've been discussing over on the other thread about potential new Middle-earth stories, publishers have a tendency to lay down pretty strict rules for authors:
Quote:
The whole process of producing mass-market books now works against quality. The paucity of stand-alone genre novels, especially but not only in fantasy, is a testament to their generally poor quality, and that can be blamed on the padding. If you write a good novella, you must pad it to a fare-thee-well to make it a salable novel; so when readers see a novel not part of a series, they almost expect to find an overstuffed novella. If you have a story that wants to be a single tight novel, plenty of unscrupulous operators will urge you to dilute it into a trilogy. Beyond that point there is not much commercial incentive for further adulteration, unless your first name is Robert and your last name Jordan.
Even the tools we write with are conducive to hack and bloat. The copyist-monks of the Middle Ages valued every stroke of the pen, and wasted no written words. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, for instance, is an extremely terse work; for all its immense scope and importance, it fits easily in 300 pages of print. We find, at the end of mediaeval manuscripts, reminders of the labour that produced them. One scribe finished a book with the couplet, Explicit hoc totum: pro Christo da mihi potum......
hat was a sign of things to come. Publishers began to discover the selling-power of big books and multi-volume novels, and after the disappearance of the dollar paperback, made them the mainstay of their business. The loose and sloppy prose of the word-processor generation was perfectly suited to their needs. They were publishing books in greater numbers and at greater length than ever before, with editorial staffs constantly shrinking; one hears of cases where a single editor is expected to acquire and publish a hundred books per year. Meanwhile print runs were shrinking, advances and royalties remaining static at best; so that a mid-list author, to survive, had to become a hack, churning out vast quantities of work and sending them to press only half revised. The result: countless acres of what in our especial field is called, with a perfectly justified sneer, ‘Extruded Fantasy Product’. (The more general term ‘Extruded Book Product’ is occasionally used as well. I Googled that phrase and found to my chagrin that my own LiveJournal profile topped the list.) http://superversive.livejournal.com/49083.html
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Add to that the real fear among publishers of causing offence (controversy is ok, but don't offend!).
Of course, fantasy has certain rules - mainly based on what Tolkien did, ironically. You can have 'Dark Lords', Goblins, Trolls, Dragons, & wicked Wizards, because that's what's expected by those who read those novels. What I mean is, the people who read such books are unlikely to object to the portrayal of fantasy villains, & the kind of people who would object would not be the kind of people who would read that kind of thing.
That said, an 'Angmarian' villain is not going to cause apoplexy in the way a Muslim villain will.....