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Message: <blockquote data-quote="The_Gneech" data-source="post: 5380783" data-attributes="member: 6779">I always enjoy a good analysis of REH and/or JRRT (and HPL for that matter), but I do have a couple of objections to raise...I don't know where you get this last line. Who in the world could possibly be more trustworthy than Sam Gamgee? And who, by the end of the story, is more respected and deserving of that respect?See above. Who is it that you seem to think JRRT is looking down on? The orcs? It's not lack of lineage that makes orcs objectionable -- particularly if you go with the "once elves" origin -- it's the fact that they're cruel, petty, greedy, tyrranical, and hate beautiful things.I'm not sure what you're getting at here -- Aragorn has a very specific reason to be paranoid, namely that Frodo is carrying the Ultimate MacGuffin of Doom that will either save or destroy the world, and using it to show off dancing on the tables of the Prancing Pony where anybody and their brother might see it.I saw a quote somewhere, now lost to the mists of memory, where someone asked Tolkien if he'd read any of Howard's work, and Tolkien replied that he had and enjoyed it. Whether he specifically drew from this, I have no idea. But he was a big believer in both borrowing, and being borrowed from.HPL's creatures as a rule are not strictly inimical to human life either; it's more that on a cosmic scale, human life just doesn't matter. Individual creatures on a similar scale, such as the Mi-Go in "Whisperer in Darkness," can and do get along with humans just fine, and the Old Ones in "Mountains of Madness" are described as being "men," for all their being 12' green barrels with starfishes for heads.The "Was it all a dream?" flavor of this ending, along with others like "Frost Giant's Daughter," is inherited from the earlier "trip of faerieland" literary tradition, which is a well that JRRT draws from often as well. The two of them also employed deliberately archaic language in order to "heighten" their tale, although Tolkien (being a linguist first and a writer second) had a slight edge on Howard in that department, as well as drawing on historical and world mythical sources (where Howard may have had more of the edge, due to his voracious historical reading as a youth). In a lot of ways, the two writers are a lot more similar to each other than people often think.-The Gneech <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f60e.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":cool:" title="Cool    :cool:"  data-smilie="6"data-shortname=":cool:" /></blockquote>

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