The age of anxiety:

[davem]

Well, he's wrong in that LotR wasn't written after two world wars but during the second world war - maybe that's why there is such a clear division between good & evil in the book: when evil is so obvious its not too difficult to draw up sides.

Of course, the major difference between Tolkien & Pullman is that Tolkien had experienced war first hand, & knew what real evil was - he stated in one letter that there were Orcs & Angels on both sides. One thing Tolkien could not do as a result was think of evil in Miltonic terms - his 'Satan' is not a Byronic hero (a la Lord Asriel in HDM) offering defiance to God & liberation to man, but a gutless thug who, when the end comes doesn't go forth to face his foes & go down in a blaze of glory, but rather cowers in his deepest dungeon dreading the inevitable punishment for his crimes.

So, while Pullman can play games with evil, Tolkien cannot. Tolkien knows evil for what it is & can't pretend its otherwise than it is. Perhaps its true that Pullman's work does reflect the belief that this is an age of anxiety & that to him things are 'more complicated & murky', but I don't think things were that way for Tolkien. He'd seen the reality of evilmore starkly & clearly than Pullman & to him things weren't at all murky - they were clear & simple. Good & Evil to him were the same as they had always been, & it was a matter of recognising them & fighting against them. I suspect Tolkien would have said the problem wasn't that good & evil had become indefinable & relative ('one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter'), but that people didn't realise that its always been a case of fighting the long defeat....if you tell yourself that evil is relative you don't have to stand up to it. In short, I don't think Tolkien ever felt the kind of anxiety being discussed in the programme.

All of which probably makes no sense, because I'm trying to type this while nursing a teething six month old. Please feel free to pull the forgoing to pieces....