[littlemanpoet]

Original question:

is it right, or acceptable, to demand that Fantasy shouldn't explore certain ideas - if those ideas challenge, or attack, certain values or beliefs?

It seems to me that the reverse of this question ought to be posed as well:
Is it right or acceptable to demand that Fantasy ought to explore certain ideas - if those ideas harmonize with contemporary values --- such as the horrors, cruelties, and brutality of war?

Good Fantasy convinces, bad Fantasy doesn't. But bad Fantasy isn't a 'threat' to Churches or political regimes, or to anyone's personal beliefs - because bad fantasy doesn't convince: it feels fake. Only good fantasy is a threat - because it does convince - of its 'reality', the possibility that a world like that is possible (if only logically possible).

Perhaps it would be more useful to say that good fantasy doesn't descend into polemics and bad fantasy might. Pullman breaks his own spell with polemics. So to my mind, fantasy is not the prolbem people think it is, except to the weakminded who want to be told what to accept and reject without having to think for themselves.

Does good fantasy have to be rooted in reality to work?

Fantasy cannot help but be rooted in reality. It's still a sun whether green or yellow or beige. So the question becomes, "How rooted in reality must a fantasy work be to work as believable (legitimate) fantasy?" Do the author's causes follow to believable results?

Of course, it could be (and has been) argued that Tolkien didn't write fantasy at all, but a romance, as he said himself.

Well, Tolkien's depiction of fantasy eschewed an explicit depiction of Evil.

It depends on what you mean. The banality of orcs is pretty graphically conveyed. The potency of the witch king and the evil of the Morgul valley come across powerfully. Perhaps what is meant here is the degree of explicitness; which is, of course, the author's prerogative.

But it still leaves us with evil & ugliness of war being presented as, if not 'good' at least glorious...

Every author makes choices. Tolkien chose to imply rather than rake through the squalor of it. Why desire the squalor?

Tolkien was not against war. Meriadoc's answer to Frodo in the Scouring of the Shire shows that. A war to defend home and community was not merely legitimate but virtuous; not to defend is to succumb to cowardice.

Tolkien's 'sin' is not that he fails to depict violent death in a graphic way - its that he goes to the other extreme & shows it as too clean & neat.

This is a demand for Tolkien to do in regard to war what Edmund Wilson demanded regarding sex. To show the horror, cruelty, and brutality of war, was not Tolkien's point.

In the end, Tolkien really doesn't need an excuse for his choices.