I don't suppose that Christopher Tolkien, or any other trustee of the Tolkien Estate, actually reads everything that mentions even his own name, let alone JRRT's. The trustees leave that to the Estate's legal representatives (
Manches of Oxford, I believe), whose advice I expect they follow in most cases.
Now, the basis of davem's annoyance seems to be that the Tolkien Estate can and does rigidly control the production and dissemination of all material by and closely related to J.R.R. Tolkien, including his image, languages and, apparently, favourite typefaces. I can't really blame them for wanting to do this, and to be honest I can't really fault the law for allowing them to do so. The point of libel laws is to prevent people from disseminating false written reports of our personalities and conduct, and the Tolkien estate is trying, by controlling the use of Tolkien's image, to maintain that protection for JRRT posthumously as I should like to do for my own family. It shouldn't be enough to transplant the false report into a loosely fictional environment and claim artistic freedom. As for controlling the use of material produced by JRRT, well that's nice and simple. JRRT isn't around to exercise that control, but the copyright still exists, legally in the hands of his heirs and successors. If there were no protection of copyright, publishers could simply take manuscripts they were sent, print them commercially and keep all of the profits. The authors would have to be content to see their names in print, while somebody else made a fortune from their work. In fact, it was something of this nature that started the whole Tolkien legal odyssey in the first place: I'm sure we've all heard of Ace Paperbacks. The basic principle seems to be that the Estate doesn't want to see people making money out of JRRT's name, image and ideas unless they get a cut of the profits and the project is one that they consider appropriate. If that means that I don't see (for whatever unfathomable reason) the verse
Beowulf, then at least it also means that I won't have to read about a fist-fight in Balliol Quad between Tolkien and F.R. Leavis or Tolkien as the leader of an underground fascist group. Robot Tolkien would, I'm sure, be a great loss to us all, but I scarcely think that Manches are going to trouble themselves with him.
Since this work is to be published in the United States, U.S. law will apply rather than British, which I suppose is good news for those who like their literary criticism to be fictionalised. The Tolkien Estate would have far greater powers to prevent me from publishing works including Tolkien as a character. I'm not sure that I'd be happy doing that anyway: I didn't know him, and a fictonalised version of someone runs too great a risk of creating a new and inaccurate public perception of that person. Perhaps that is why the Estate is so keen to suppress such a use of JRRT, although I notice that the publication of
Here There Be Dragons has gone ahead without their interference, and that a film is planned.
As for blurring the lines between fiction and reality, literary criticism and literature itself, well it's all a bit too much like playing to the gallery for my liking. There's nothing particularly groundbreaking in it - Tolkien's relative paucity of female characters was the subject of many early negative reviews, and I'm sure we must be into post-post-modernism at least by now. Such an approach runs the risk of creating poor criticism that is also dull literature, and failing to please even its own tiny target audience. Perhaps without the controversy of an attempted ban we'd be looking at yet another forgettable book in a long tradition of forgettable books.