Moorcock blasts Tolkien

Old news, but since Tolkien and Moorcock both influenced D&D so much I was wondering what other enworlders thought.

Here's the essay of Epic Pooh

Here's a bit from the Wiki-about Epic Pooh:

and more from the wiki


I tend to think of myself as more a Moorcock D&D DM/player than a Tolkien. When reading Ptolus, I get a strong Tolkien vib, but it is an urban setting. It has a ton of gray making me think of Moorcock (and Lovecraft.) Groups that a player will like/agree with are sided with villians and things like that....Ptolus can make you think or be totally brainless (choice of the players and DM, a setting that fits everyone)....

When I read Eric Boyd's post about Dragons of Faerûn...the whole Unther vs Mulhorand issue makes me ponder and think rather than calms. ...all the moral issues.

There is the Difference between FR, Eberron, Middle Earth, Greyhawk etc. thread where it is discussed that there really isn't much difference between the settings... (however after reading Eric Boyd's post, I tend to see FR as a complex beast of different authors...i.e. some parts are Tolkein and others are not)

Well, I dont think an attack on writing that is designed to comfort is a very valid criticism. Comfort is a very important thing.

I generally like Moorcock's writing more than Tolkien's (much, much easier to get through) but on this I think hes being pedantically iconoclastic and snarky.

Moorcock is a self-important weenie who makes the same mistake all such artists make. It's what the reader/viewer/listener takes away from your work that matters, not what you intended.

Despite the authors' denials, many have read LotR and Watership Down as cautionary tales about appeasement in the face of fascism and totalitarianism, among other interpretations. Hardly safe and comforting.

I knew too many proto-goth Elric wanna-be's in college to take Moorcock as seriously as he takes himself, anyway.

Rodrigo Istalindir said:

I knew too many proto-goth Elric wanna-be's in college to take Moorcock as seriously as he takes himself, anyway.

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I knew one of those.

>.<

sckeener said:

The title arises from Moorcock's claim that the writing of Tolkien, Lewis, Adams and others has a similar purpose to the Winnie-the-Pooh writings of A. A. Milne, another author of whom he disapproves: it is intended to comfort rather than challenge.

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I know how he feels. I disapprove of can openers. They are intended to open cans rather than to carve pumpkins.

Seriously, even if we assume he's right, why would it be bad that works are different from each other? If every book was intended solely to be "challenging" (or solely "comforting" or solely anything else), literature would be awfully boring.

I read it. He just comes off as being resentful of Tolkien's success to me.

Moorcock does have a point.

Tolkein's prose, plotlines, and characters are extremely safe. This has had an inordinate influence on so many writers who followed him, churning out their safe, predictable, trite trilogies in which the good guys are good, the bad guys are bad, and the Hero gathers his Seven Samurai of assorted characters who go on a Cook's Tour of a generic fantasy world which is exactly the right size to fit onto two facing pages of a standard paperback, their mission being to Collect the Plot Vouchers which they can turn in to the author at the end of the trilogy, at which time the Dark Lord is defeated and everyone lives Happily Ever After in your standard, safe and extremely dull eucatastrophe.

It's become a horrible formula of bad fantasy, and some writers have churned out reams and reams of it (not to mention David Eddings or Terry Brooks or Robert Jordan by name, of course... oops!)

Now, Mr Moorcock is in no real position to criticize, since he's spent the past several decades writing the same book again and again, but he does have two real advantages over the Tolkein-imitators: He has a new plot to offer, and he tells it in simple, unpretentious prose without any waffle. Moorcock writes in five pages what Tolkein or Eddings would write in fifty pages, and Brooks would write in a hundred and fifty pages, and Jordan would write in a ten-volume epic.

I'm certainly not a fan of Tolkien, but a casual reader of Moorcock. In the end: Who cares what he thinks? I like his books, but letting him teach me that he is far more mature or liberal or whatever simply strikes the wrong chord inside of me. Not to mention ripping a dead man's work.

At least we've got our own fantasy version of Hogan vs. Macho Man. Even if one can't strike back anymore...

PapersAndPaychecks said:

Now, Mr Moorcock is in no real position to criticize, since he's spent the past several decades writing the same book again and again, but he does have two real advantages over the Tolkein-imitators: He has a new plot to offer, and he tells it in simple, unpretentious prose without any waffle. Moorcock writes in five pages what Tolkein or Eddings would write in fifty pages, and Brooks would write in a hundred and fifty pages, and Jordan would write in a ten-volume epic.

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That's a fair assessment, and squares with his admiration of Leiber.

Guys like Leiber and REH were writing for the pulp rags at the time. You had 4-8 pages scattered about the magazine, not 160+ plus pages to spread your story over. Writing for that format leads to a kind of economy in one's writing. Sort of an implied, Python-esque "GET ON WITH IT!".

Moorecock's writing follows in that tradition, IMNSHO.

On the other hand, Moorecock did use the work "bourgeois" twice in that opinion piece. Using it once makes me suspicious. Twice sets off my "elitist " alarm. :\

For me, the difference between Tolkien and modern writers like Moorcock, Brooks, Jordan, et. al. is that Tolkien had a story, and he only had to tell it once.

Compare this to today's "it has to be 13 volumes" crowd of tree-killers, and Tolkien becomes a breath of fresh air.