[Ibrîniðilpathânezel]

The entire notion of "moral certainty" even existing in the world is completely lost on me at the moment, I'm afraid. I live in a country where money is God, and in a state where a madman has bought his way into power, with sufficient cronies in the government to make his immoral ideas reality. They are utterly indifferent to the fact that what they are doing is causing not only hardship but intense hatred and resentment among those they are oppressing, and they are blind to the fact that what they are doing will inevitably lead to civil war. And they loudly call themselves moral Christians. So moral certainty? Doesn't exist, from what I can see.

I would say that Tolkien represents to many critics and analysts moral convention. He is the traditionalist, and to many who are looking to distinguish their work and make ripples that will be noticed, it's better to express preference for the novel, the unconventional — even if that, too, becomes conventional in time (I have in mind the nonconformist hippies of my youth, who eventually conformed to one another rather than the traditional). Authors like Moorcock fly in the face of convention, reject it, even belittle it, searching for something new, sometimes finding it, often not. And such as he will tend to be the darlings of critics who also want to be unconventional.

I remember reading the Broken Sword a long time ago. I enjoyed it, and never even thought about comparing it to Tolkien, not in the sense of measuring the merits of one over the other. It was different, different wasn't bad, it was merely another perspective. It made neither book better or worse than the other, but did offer another way to look at something similar.

Ah, forgive some curmudgeonly ranting above. I'm getting old, and I'm wondering what the world is coming to, and I'm feeling like Tolkien did in one of his letters to his son, where he felt that the forces of Mordor were winning.