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Originally Posted by Bęthberry
Just for the sake of discussion, care to elaborate on why you think this is one of the best?
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Well, for one thing, most of the reviews I've seen so far have had little original to say. There are probably no more than a dozen really good ones I've come across - ones with something significant to say. I think this reviewer has real insight into what Tolkien was doing, & demolishes a couple of the sillier reviews. What's interesting is that this guy is a Catholic, & one would think that as such he'd play up the 'bigger picture' argument - seeing CoH in the context of the Legendarium, & drawing in the 'eucatastrophic' fall of Morgoth - as certain of my 'opponents' in the Turin the Hopeless thread did:
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Originally Posted by Tom Simon
Who, then, is morally simplistic, or childish, or escapist? Is it the great authors of the last century — Tolkien, Orwell, Vonnegut, Burgess, to name only a few — who dressed up human wickedness in fairy-tale costumes so that we could bear to look upon it and call it by its name? Or the academics and critics, the Modernists and Postmodernists, who refused to look and pretended it did not exist? It takes a peculiar and wilful blindness to accuse Tolkien of moral puerility, or to read him without seeing the deadly seriousness of the issues his fantasies raise. The Children of Húrin is Tolkien at his darkest, Tolkien looking into the abyss; and I find it deeply disturbing that none of his enemies and few of his friends seem capable of grasping the fact.
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This is another very good piece on Tolkien by Simon
http://superversive.livejournal.com/47255.html#cutid1