Eating Disorders

...ba href=/eating disorder/a/b, live in round houses, and break into unbearable faux-minstrelsy at the first sign of a rune.

(Surely their name alone is evidence enough of the movement from the sublime to the ridiculous in one sub-imaginative stroke.) Oh, and instead of the Green Knight, who inspires real fear, we get orcs and trolls.

The Wampa Ice Creature and Jar Jar Binks of Star Wars are not far away.

Tolkien’s decision to rewrite the medieval romance narrative, with its central quest motif and all the journeys that proliferate from its central path, counts as one of the great wrong turnings in English writing.

All he manages to imitate is the length of the medieval stories: we get an endlessly plod-plod-plodding epic, overlong, repetitive and exhausting.

This is the textual equivalent of Seconal.

Those who persist in thinking that this is the acme of fantasy fiction would be better off looking at Stanislaw Lem’s Solaris or the Strugatsky brothers’ Roadside Picnic, where unimaginably different new worlds are set down on the pages, not shires filled with naff tree dwellers.

This is Warwickshire Exoticised, with Anglo-Saxon and Celtic inflected names, not a new heaven, new earth.

Then, take Tolkien’s breathtakingly condescending portrayal of the “servant classes” in the figure of Sam Gamgee.

Of course, he displays traditional and expected qualities of the class: blind, unquestioning loyalty (read “servility”), unswerving desire to serve the master...

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