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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Salthanas" data-source="post: 1213671" data-attributes="member: 9689">I don't really think that this statement is fully applicable to Tolkien purely because his writing methods were quite radical compared to other authors (remember that the whole work of Middle earth is primarily linguistic in inspiration as he said many times). To start with Tolkien used to name his characters and places and then derive from that standpoint alone how the name defined the character. His writing therefore never followed the standard path of fleshing a character out for example, he actually tried to work out how something came to be or what is was like in a much more logical fashion. He after all regarded himself as more of a historian reporting what happened in Middle earth so when he wrote something it was not the case that he wrote it because thats how he wanted it to be, more that from his standpoint that was the only possible way it could be. Tolkien always regarded Middle Earth as something he had discovered not created himself.Whilst its pretty much impossible for an author to not have a message in any work he writes, because after all that work is based on his on life experiences and will always therefore reflect his persective on the world the problem it seems with people like Melville is that they don't really understand just how fastidious Tolkien was with the above method. This is the same man after all who when asked by a by a farmer if she could name some of her bulls after the elves in Rivendell flatly told her that it was inappropriate  and suggested a name like Mundo instead. Following that though he then had to sit down and work out why Mundo was a word related to bulls. Therefore while trying to say that Tolkien had no message is as such probably wrong however trying to draw extreme conclusions from the work is also equally inaccurate (which is what Melville has done). Indeed the fact that people seem to disagree so much about what Tolikens book means and what it supposedly says is probably an indication of some sort as to just how much freedom the reader is allowed to draw conclusions of his own rather than being forced in a particular direction by the author. Anyway the whole idea that Tolkien was some sort of class snob is ridiculous. He even explicitly states in his letters that Sam Gamgee was based on the privates he met in the trenches, people who he says he regarded as being much superior to himself even though he was an officer. He must have been a very strange class snob if he regarded the supposed "lower class" as being superior to the "higher class". Personally I think that this view is illustrated by how Tolkien writes about Sam throughout the book. If Melville is trying to suggest that Tolkien is a class snob I'd think it more likely that his observation seems more one drawn by an agenda than by common sense , even though I'm sure that many people would be shocked that such a thing happens in the world of literary criticism <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /></blockquote>

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