Why Michael Moorcock Despises Tolkien and C. S. Lewis | Hacker News Reader

Why Michael Moorcock Despises Tolkien and C. S. Lewis

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15 pointsBerislavLopac34 comments

A hundred years from now, people will still be reading Tolkien and Lewis, and almost nobody will remember who Moorcock was.

And we'll still be debating whether or not Tolkien was actually any good at writing.

The Hobbit is written well enough to read aloud. Breaking the fourth wall helps.

The Lord of the Rings isn't.

CS Lewis was a much better writer.

Tolkien made a franchise because his ideas were novel (non of Lewis's bible stories) and we've been seeing new products since he died.

Orc lives matter.

I don't even know who he is!

Downvoted for not knowing who someone is. That's a first for me.

A hundred years from now?

I'll bet if you took a survey even today, vastly more people would recognize Tolkien and Lewis than Moorcock.

That was probably true even before the LOTR and CON movies. Tolkien and Lewis sold a helluva lot of books.

I think the Ballantine Tolkien paperbacks I had when I was a kid were something like the 40th edition, and that was (cough) a long time ago.

Well, I myself had heard of Moorcock before this. I’ve never read any of his fiction, whereas I’ve read some of Tolkien’s (and they made us read The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe at school, but I never finished it.) But, for Moorcock, I read his interview with Andrea Dworkin, [0] and also a speech he gave at a conference commemorating her. [1] In fact, when I hear his name, Andrea Dworkin is the first thing to pop into my head. [2] I doubt I’m very representative of the general population, however.

[0] http://www.nostatusquo.com/ACLU/dworkin/MoorcockInterview.ht...

[1] http://www.clarechambers.com/andrea-dworkin-commemorative-co...

[2] https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/how-we-met-...

Every time i re-read 'The Lord of the Rings' I'm amazed at how 'racist' it is in the literal sense of the word. Everything is built around races: the good characters are from the north/west, while the bad ones come from the south/east, etc.

Because the whole book is elvish propaganda.

Mordor: "[that] amazing city of alchemists and poets, mechanics and astronomers, philosophers and physicians, the heart of the only civilization in Middle-earth to bet on rational knowledge and bravely pitch its barely adolescent technology against ancient magic"

Yeah, I was thinking about that book[0])

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Ringbearer

Here are similar works, anyone have potential additions?

   Grendel
   The Persian Version
   Snow, Glass, Apples

(I have half a mind to write an epistolary short story from the point of view of one of Winston Smith's coworkers at the Ministry of Truth, dismayed about Smith's paranoiac reactions to normal office routine —colleagues transferring, etc.—, his labile personality[0] in general, and his conspiratorial mindset[1] in particular. All the objective events of Parts 1 and 2 can easily be explained much more rationally than in Smith's interpretations, but Part 3, being so explicit, has thus far resisted such treatment)

Lagniappe: "there can be no peace until they renounce their Rabbit God and accept our Duck God" https://www.newyorker.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/141201_...

EDIT: also, Bulgakov's hard-boiled detective version of the gospel (his who-dun-it has a pragmatic advantage in that although christians and jews both still exist, no extant groups claim to belong to the Senatus PopulusQue Romanus)

[0] consider how quickly he hooked up with somone who merely dropped papers in front of him?

[1] want someone to kill people in a random pizzeria for conspiracy reasons? Smith's your man.

>short story from the point of view of one of Winston Smith's coworkers

I like the idea. I think the part 3 can co-exist the new interpretation of parts 1 and 2 -- Smith can be a conspiracy nut amid mundane reality but Big Brother's security apparatus nonetheless exists and for some reason eventually gets interested in Smith.

The northwest being Britain, the southeast being Germany. Such were the times.

On the issue of how Tolkien thought about race in his works, Tolkien, Race, and Racism in Middle-earth, by Robert Stuart (2022) is very good. Despite its slightly clickbaity title, the author does a careful analysis and avoids polemic.

And rather misogynist, and monarchist, and a boatload of other things.

Many of those I'd write off to Tolkien being a product of his times. At least his heroes seemed to have many ideals which are still accounted virtuous.

Tolkien's monarchism, though - even in the days of the Old Testament, it was obvious that hereditary monarchy never, ever worked for long. Because the heirs of great men always regressed to the mean. Pretty damn fast. (After King George III, Britain mostly solved that problem by turning their hereditary monarchs into mostly-symbolic figureheads.) And Tolkien served in the hellish trenches of WWI - a war which dug deep, dark graves for both hereditary monarchy and European superiority.

Hmm...in many ways, I could argue that Tolkien's fantasy writings were mostly escapism for him - to a old-fashioned romantic utopia, where "land of milk and honey, and the kingdom is powerful and prosperous, and the king is always good" was at least possible. And consider the massive decline in the real Britain's fortunes between Tolkien boyhood (~1900), and LOTR's publication (~1955)...

Many of those I'd write off to Tolkien being a product of his times

Well, there are two products-of-their-time: the writer and the reader.

Since we readers are products of a time where we're incessantly propagandised (albeit more for economic than political ends), we ought to habitually be reading for both explicit text and implicit subtext.

Monarchy never really works for long in Tolkien's works either. The history of the kings of Gondor is all strife and crises, and in Tolkien's abandoned sequel already 100 years later “the people of Gondor in times of peace, justice and prosperity, would become discontented and restless — while the dynasts descended from Aragorn would become just kings and governors — like Denethor or worse.” (Letter 256)

> consider the massive decline in the real Britain's fortunes between Tolkien boyhood (~1900), and LOTR's publication (~1955)...

Tolkien called conlang'ing (and by extension, worldbuilding?) "the solitary vice": a phrase which would have had a different denotation in his Edwardian childhood than the rather literal denotation we ascribe to it.

Lagniappe: https://www.reddit.com/r/conlangs/comments/8f425o/sex_in_you...

Exercise for the reader: how solarpunk would wider europe be now, if the British Empire and the German Empire (and their descendants) hadn't played Sith Master/Apprentice games, not once but twice, last century? (1914-1918 and 1939-1945)

oh bother, here's the original article: "epic pooh" (1978) https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/english/currentstudents/under...

I don't know how closely Moorcock read his rabbits: in the Watership Down I read, Le Guin's Omelas existed as a warren, a little more realistic and a little less difficult to map to our own circumstances, and Adams had the honesty to explore the ambiguity, the decency to point out the economic and cultural benefits that Cowslip et.al. got from their arrangement.

Milne, on the other hand, doesn't ever delve into the explicit delapinisation of the less fortunate.

So does David Brin:

J.R.R. Tolkien -- enemy of progress (2002):

https://www.salon.com/2002/12/17/tolkien_brin/

I wonder if some (or all?) of this scorn is due to LotR's pop status - many probably consider it the pinnacle of fantasy without having read through much else in the genre of that era; for many more it probably is everything they know of fantasy. His works are indeed special but there are some really great authors like Eddison, Peake, and Leiber (and Moorcock, I suppose) who don't seem to get much recognition.

I didn't see any mention of the fact that both Lewis + Tolkien lived through World Wars. Nor the fact that those books were also written in an "era".

I can't say that I'm surprised at the tone, or 'verbose' writing style of either book (think HG Wells, or Dickens for example).

Compared to, say, Pratchett, post-war, humorous, short punchy sentences. Or Douglas Adams.

They're literally (pun intended) of their era.

If you are interested in the history of Tolkien criticism, The Power of Tolkien's Prose: Middle-Earth's Magical Style, by Steve Walker (2009) is good reading.

I enjoy scifi/fantasy but had no clue who Michael Moorcock is.

Are his books good or this just a jealous ranty guy?

I thought he was rather well known in fantasy circles. He definitely does not have the same pop-cult status as Tolkien but his Elric series as well as Gloriana are worth reading, IMO.

Hmm looks like the essay-on-essay author has only read the Elric part of the Eternal Champion.

Didn't know he was still alive.

Well, he has that going for him at least.

Is it because of their last names and great books?

Well, yeah, they’re books for children, of course they sound like fairy tales. Maybe Moorcock doesn’t understand his genre.

The Hobbit was definitely written for children.

The Lord of the Rings definitely was not.

Because he is "edgy", those old people couldn't appeal to his emo punk sensibilities /s

>Like Chesterton, and other orthodox Christian writers who substituted faith for artistic rigour [Tolkien] sees the petit bourgeoisie, the honest artisans and peasants, as the bulwark against Chaos.

This is the crux of his argument, and its an ideological one. He conflates his ideology (which is opposite to that of Tolkien, Lewis, Chesterton and co) for artistic rigour (sic). The rest, about the language and such, are mere dressing.

>But there’s nothing wrong with a religious person writing religious books, even if that religion is privileged, as Christianity is.

How was Christianity privileged exactly? Should Tolkien's and Lewis's 1950s Britain, a 99% Christian nation, nerf its faith for some reason? (especially since, knowing the Church of England, it wasn't that strong to begin with).

Christianity is (or rather was) as privileged in Christian countries, as other religions were/are privileged in countries following them.

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