1. Capitalizing “Towering Archetypal Evil” and “Irritatingly Radiant Good” is presumably intended to call attention to the book’s black and white (and thus cliched) vision of evil, which tends in these lines of critique to be accepted as a given. The only problem is that it’s absurd. First of all, the book paints evil in a number of different lights, its forces hardly monolithic and often not allied with each other (Shelob doesn’t really even recognize Sauron’s authority, and is just as likely to eat an orc as a hobbit; Saruman allies with Sauron because he has no choice, but neither trusts the other and the forces of each are forever at each other’s throats; and check out what Wormtongue does to Saruman at the end and try to explain how one dimensional the relationship among evil forces is), and good doesn’t come off much better–the relationship between Rohan and Minas Tirith is hardly an untroubled one, and what kind of good is Denethor, exactly? Second: Gollum. If Tolkien is a black and white thinker, how exactly do we explain Gollum, or Sam’s treatment of him (which is not responded to sympathetically by either Frodo or Tolkien), or Gandalf’s repudiation of Frodo’s wish that Bilbo had killed him? How do we explain the kinship Frodo feels with Gollum?
I mean: what’s the foundation? What’s the baseline to which Tolkien is retreating? If all of these brave new world fantasies take a look at the gritty side of life–which, by the way, gets old just as quickly as any of the allegedly “black and white” stuff–what are they differing from? From what are they breaking away?
Hmm. It couldn’t be Tolkien’s work, could it?
And that’s really the point, one which it’s hard for me to believe I even need to make: Tolkien came first, or at least first for modern works. If you want to blame people for making Towering Archetypal Evil and Irritatingly Radiant Good into cliches worthy of capitalizing (if you feel such a need…frankly I think there’s room in fantasy for traditional and non-traditional forms, and I have a tendency to be suspicious of people who like speculative fiction so long it only speculates in certain ways), shouldn’t you be blaming the slavish imitators before you attack the original? When Tolkien wrote about orcs, elves, dwarves and Nazgul, he was the first one to do it in the way he did, and his work forever revolutionized fantasy. Attacking him for relying on cliches is a little like attacking Michael Jordan for playing like Kobe Bryant…not quite the, you know, chronological order in which they appeared.
As I said, Tolkien is hardly immune to criticism. But if you are going to criticize him, it would be nice if it be something both true and attributable to his actual writing, not just something you wish he had written.