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\u00a9 George Allen & Unwin<\/em><\/p>\n <\/p>\n I\u2019ve never really liked J.R.R. Tolkien\u2019s Lord of the Rings<\/em> trilogy (1954-55).\u00a0 There…\u00a0 I\u2019ve said it.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n When I was a teenager I had The Fellowship of the Rings<\/em>, The Two Towers<\/em> and The Return of the King<\/em> within the covers of one weighty tome that ran to 1077 pages.\u00a0 I stumbled through about 800 pages of it.\u00a0 Sometimes I left it aside for months and when I returned I had to reread long tracts of it to remind myself what was going on.\u00a0 Eventually, I abandoned it forever at the bit where Frodo and Sam blunder into the lair of Shelob, the giant spider.\u00a0 Thus, for years afterwards, I wasn\u2019t entirely sure if (a) Frodo got to complete his quest, and (b) he didn\u2019t end up as giant-spider-food.\u00a0 Though, given the probability of a happy ending, I assumed that (a) he did, and (b) he didn\u2019t.\u00a0 Finally, in 2003, I saw Peter Jackson\u2019s film adaptation of The Return of the King<\/em> and my assumptions were confirmed.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n I found Tolkien\u2019s writing style plodding at times, but what really defeated me was the dullness of the characters.\u00a0 The evil ones (Gollum, Saruman) were interesting, but as far as the good guys were concerned, the ones I was supposed to be rooting for\u2026\u00a0 Dearie me.\u00a0 I had hopes for Aragorn early on, in his guise as the enigmatic Strider, but my curiosity soon waned.\u00a0 Boromir was agreeably conflicted, but he didn\u2019t make it beyond the end of The Fellowship of the Ring<\/em>.\u00a0 (In the 2001 movie version, he\u2019s played by Sean Bean, so you know immediately what\u2019s going to happen to him.)\u00a0 Meanwhile, the Hobbits of the Shire were insufferably bland. \u00a0Their nicey-nicey, respectable, know-your-place-and-respect-your-betters manner so annoyed me that I suspected if the Shire had newspapers, the Daily Mail and Daily Express would dominate the market.\u00a0 Sam Gamgee, tending to Frodo like a batman serving a member of the officer class, was particularly irksome in his cap-doffing.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n No wonder the fantasy and science-fiction author Michael Moorcock wrote sourly of Lord of the Rings<\/em><\/a>: \u201cIf the Shire is a suburban garden, Sauron and his henchmen are that old bourgeois bugaboo, the Mob \u2013 mindless football supporters throwing their beer bottles over the fence, the worst aspects of modern urban society represented as the whole by a fearful, backward-yearning class for whom \u2018good taste\u2019 is synonymous with \u2018restraint\u2019\u2026 and \u2018civilised\u2019 behaviour means \u2018conventional behaviour in all circumstances\u2019.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/p>\n And though I was a teenager at the time, I don\u2019t think it\u2019s likely that if I read The Lord of the Rings<\/em> now, I\u2019d have an epiphany, revise my opinion of the trilogy and acclaim it as a masterpiece.\u00a0 For one thing, I read Ursula K. Le Guin\u2019s original Earthsea<\/em> trilogy<\/a> (1968, 70 & 72) and Mervyn Peake\u2019s Gormenghast<\/em> trilogy<\/a> (1946, 50 & 59) around the same time and thought they were brilliant.\u00a0 Indeed, the first two Gormenghast<\/em> volumes are among my all-time favourite books.\u00a0 Also back then, I tried reading Stephen Donaldson\u2019s Lord Foul\u2019s Bane<\/em> (1977), which is sometimes credited with kickstarting the \u2018grimdark\u2019 movement<\/a> in modern fantasy \u2013 more on that in a moment \u2013 and thought it was dreadful shite, an assessment shared by many people whose judgement I trust.\u00a0 So I doubt if my evaluation of Tolkien today would be any different.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n \u00a9 Penguin Books<\/em><\/p>\n <\/p>\n I should add that I never had a problem with the Lord of the Rings<\/em> movies.\u00a0 However, I generally see literature as a denser, more complicated and more profound medium than cinema.\u00a0 And though something might seem a bit staid when written on the page, that doesn\u2019t necessarily mean it\u2019ll be ineffective in the less demanding medium of images and sounds that greets you when you enter a cinema or log into a movie-streaming service.\u00a0 For me, Lord of the Rings<\/em> was perfectly palatable as a series of two-to-three-hour viewing experiences where you could enjoy the performances of some great actors and actresses (Ian McKellen, Andy Serkis, Cate Blanchett, Viggo Mortensen, Christopher Lee et al<\/em>), the stunning New Zealand scenery and Peter Jackson\u2019s obvious flair for orchestrating action and spectacle.\u00a0 They contained too much CGI, of course, but that goes without saying these days.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n So, why am I writing this?\u00a0 Well, last month saw the publication of an essay entitled Grimdull<\/em> in the Critic, which Wikipedia describes<\/a> as a \u2018monthly British political and cultural magazine\u2019 whose contributors \u2018include David Starkey, Joshua Rozenberg, Peter Hitchens and Toby Young\u2019.\u00a0 The swivel-eyed loopiness of three of those four contributors should give you an idea of where the Critic stands on the political spectrum.\u00a0 The essay\u2019s writer Sebastian Milbank \u2013 also The Critic\u2019s executive editor \u2013 says this of the author of Lord of the Rings<\/em>:<\/p>\n <\/p>\n \u201cThose who followed Tolkien, even from a commercial perspective, understood that modern fantasy was following in his wake; he gave a sense of moral and literary seriousness to the building of imaginary worlds, which would otherwise be absorbed into moralistic allegory or semi-comical whimsy. \u00a0Tolkien\u2019s world feels ‘real’ not only because of his attention to detail, but because he builds a sense of emotionally freighted history and recognisable moral stakes, set out in a language strange enough to be compelling, familiar enough to be taken seriously.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Alas for Tolkien\u2019s worthy legacy, Milbank argues, modern fantasy writing has been taken over and corrupted by grimdark, ‘a recent coinage for an ongoing craze in “gritty” and dark fantasy settings’, popularized by writers such as Joe Abercrombie<\/a>, Mark Lawrence<\/a> and the blockbusting, blood-tits-and-dragons-meister<\/em> that is George R.R. Martin<\/a>.\u00a0 \u201cIt\u2019s a genre\u2026\u201d Milbank bellyaches, \u201cgenerally in a mediaeval fantasy setting, but shorn of any romance. \u00a0Characters are overwhelmingly cynical, and those few who exhibit nobility are treated as foolish or naive. \u00a0Generally a chaotic war is happening, or about to happen. \u00a0Religion features, but largely as a tool of social control, often portrayed\u2026 as even more cruel and cynical than the secular world around it. \u00a0Dark observations about human nature substitute for any moral drama, with characters seeking to outwit, manipulate or overpower one another in a kind of Darwinian struggle for dominance.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/p>\n \u00a9 Bantam Books<\/em><\/p>\n <\/p>\n Even worse, laments Milbank, it\u2019s all the fault of the liberal left.\u00a0 \u201cIt\u2019s a script born of vaguely liberal, vaguely radical, vaguely anarchic sentiments common to most contemporary creative \u2018industries\u2019.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Who shot J.R.R.? \u00a0Those lefty grimdark degenerates did!\u00a0 Basically, Milbank\u2019s trying to open another front in the culture wars.\u00a0 This time it\u2019s evil, modern fantasy writers versus the decent, traditional, conservative values embodied by Tolkien.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n So much is wrong in his analysis that I don\u2019t have time to detail it all here. \u00a0I\u2019d direct you, though, to this recent riposte penned by the writer Cora Buhlert<\/a>.\u00a0 Firstly, she takes Milbank to task for his many omissions, made either through ignorance of fantasy literature or through disingenuity.\u00a0 In presenting the field as a simple battleground between Tolkien and grimdark, he ignores Mervyn Peake, Lord Dunsany and the copious fantasy writing that went on in the old American pulp magazines, by the likes of Robert E. Howard, Fritz Leiber and C.L. Moore, which helped popularize the sub-genre of sword and sorcery and gave us the character of Conan the Barbarian. \u00a0Simultaneously, Buhlert notes, no mention is made of other trends in modern fantasy writing, such as hopepunk<\/a>, cosy fantasy<\/a> or romantasy<\/a>.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Indeed, she points out how Milbank doesn\u2019t so much move the goalposts in his definition of grimdark as go sprinting off with the goalposts over his shoulders.\u00a0 In the course of his tortured polemic, he refers to TV shows like The Walking Dead<\/em> (2010-22), Boardwalk Empire<\/em> (2010-14) and Breaking Bad<\/em> (2008-13) and superhero movies like Captain America: Civil War<\/em> (2016).\u00a0 Two of those examples aren\u2019t remotely classifiable as fantasy \u2013 unless I remember wrongly and Walter White was actually an Orc \u2013 while the other two have nothing to do with the literature, set in medieval fantasy worlds, that he\u2019s allegedly writing about.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Milbank also takes potshots at Philip Pullman, even though, as Buhlert observes, books like Pullman\u2019s His Dark Materials<\/em> trilogy (1995-2000) aren\u2019t grimdark either.\u00a0 Presumably, Pullman gets a mention because, as a famous atheist<\/a>, he\u2019s a red flag to a bull as far as crazed Christian-morality-campaigners are concerned.\u00a0 (\u201cPhilip Pullman is a stupid, delusional, immoral, inhuman piece of garbage, while C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien were geniuses, amazing authors, and great human beings,\u201d declared one comment I read on an American fantasy website recently.)\u00a0 And predictably, he slates Michael Moorcock for being \u2018terribly dated\u2019 in his anti-establishment views.\u00a0 Strangely, considering how Moorcock\u2019s fantasy stories have greatly influenced the modern fantasy genre too, Milbank attacks him using the example of his 1966 novella Behold the Man<\/em><\/a>, which is actually a work of science fiction.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n One other serious flaw that Buhlert identifies in Milbank\u2019s essay is his implication that Tolkien popularised fantasy fiction in one fell swoop in the 1950s.\u00a0 But it wasn\u2019t until the 1960s, when Lord of the Rings<\/em> appeared in paperback in the USA, and possibly not until the 1970s, when imitators like Terry Brooks began to publish doorstop-sized \u2018high-fantasy\u2019 trilogies of their own, that Tolkien\u2019s influence really began to be felt.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n \u00a9 Overlook Press<\/em><\/p>\n <\/p>\n I\u2019d add that when I was a teenager it wasn\u2019t just me and Michael Moorcock who disliked Tolkien.\u00a0 I got the impression he wasn\u2019t particularly valued by the literary establishment \u2013 whose posh, starchy gatekeepers at the time are probably the sort of chaps whom the young-fogeyish Milbank looks back on with great admiration.\u00a0 Indeed, Edmund Wilson famously dismissed Lord of the Rings<\/em><\/a> as \u2018a children\u2019s book that somehow got out of hand\u2019, \u2018an overgrown fairy story\u2019, \u2018balderdash\u2019 and \u2018juvenile trash\u2019.\u00a0 Anthony Burgess conspicuously failed to mention it in his volume Ninety-Nine Novels: The Best in English since 1939<\/em><\/a>, though he was broadminded enough to include science-fiction and fantasy books by and \/ or authors like Brian Aldiss, J.G. Ballard, Alasdair Gray, George Orwell, Keith Roberts, T.H. White and, yes, Mervyn Peake in his list.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Cora Buhlert complains that Milbank\u2019s essay \u201cfeels as if it time-travelled here from the early 2010s\u2026\u00a0 Honestly, has Sebastian Milbank read a single novel or watched a single TV show that came out in the last five years?\u201d\u00a0 Actually, I get the impression he probably did write the thing about a decade ago, perhaps as a moan against the then astronomical popularity of George R.R. Martin\u2019s Game of Thrones<\/em> (2011-2019) TV series.\u00a0 But, recognising the essay\u2019s myriad shortcomings, he left it on the shelf \u2013 until now.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Because today we live in a time where Britain\u2019s Conservative Party politicians, and their hordes of supporters who infest the mainly right-wing British media, are aware that, if the opinion polls and by-election results are to be believed, they\u2019re in for a massive humping at the next general election.\u00a0 So dismal have the Conservatives’ 14 years in government been that their only strategy now is to try and ignite, and fight, a massive culture war on all fronts imaginable.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Thus, we\u2019ve had ex-Tory-prime minister, and catastrophe, Liz Truss \u2013 her with the shelf-life of a lettuce \u2013 raving about her premiership being sabotaged by \u2018trans-activists\u2019 in the civil service<\/a>.\u00a0 Former Deputy Conservative Party Chairman \u201830p\u2019 Lee Anderson claiming<\/a> that London\u2019s Labour Party mayor is in the pocket of \u2018Islamists\u2019.\u00a0 Neil Oliver ranting about vaccines on far-right channel GB News.\u00a0 The Daily Mail dismissing young people’s mental health problems as \u2018snowflakery\u2019.\u00a0 The police<\/a>, the universities, the judiciary, the National Trust, Net Zero, speed restrictions, the English football team<\/a>, TV sitcoms, Doctor Who<\/em><\/a>, James Bond<\/a>, you name it, British right-wingers have tried to pick a fight with it, often for the sin of being \u2018woke\u2019.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n It was just a matter of time before they got around to modern fantasy literature.\u00a0 Hence, Tolkien’s been weaponized.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n \u00a9 New Line Cinema \/ WingNut Films<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" \u00a9 George Allen & Unwin I\u2019ve never really liked J.R.R. Tolkien\u2019s Lord of the Rings trilogy (1954-55).\u00a0 There…\u00a0 I\u2019ve said it. When I was a teenager I had The Fellowship of the Rings, The Two Towers and The Return of the King within the covers of one weighty tome that ran to … <\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/bloodandporridge.co.uk\/wp\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/03\/ES-by-ULG-190x300.jpg\")
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