New Republic Article

[Dwarin Thunderhammer]

The man who wrote this article is an a troll. Pure and simple (and that's even an insult to the trolls, who were in comparison wise and intellectual).

His problem is what I believe is the problem of most modern debate. He gives no facts to support his accusations. What I find so refreshing about this forum is that during a debate people usually substantiate their opinions/statements with facts. Troll, (as "it" the "author" of this "article" shall be referred to as from here on) only quotes Tolkien thrice. When he quotes a section about the withywindle he actually complements it's dignity. The other times he attacks Tolkien's "fake" language he scoffs at a line that has remarkable similarities to Shakespeare. For example:

And that is not all that is missing. Tolkien was a devout Roman Catholic of conservative type, and he was sensitive to the charge that his Middle-earth was religionless. He replied that The Lord of the Rings was "a fundamentally religious and Catholic work." But that does not get around the difficulty: even if it can be shown that The Lord of the Rings is religious as a book--and I doubt whether even this is true in more than the superficial sense that it concerns a struggle of good against evil--the objection is that the people within the story have no religious beliefs or practices, and are thus unlike any real human society. Tolkien always insisted, and rightly, that his work was not an allegory, but the construction of a self-subsistent world with its own history. The trouble is that it is an emotionally impoverished world, in which the blood runs very thin.

Troll makes accusations about the people of middle earth being religonless. From the Silmarillion I believe it is fairly obvious that most of the Elves viewed Illuvitar as their God. This proves that he is uneducated in Tolkien lore, it would help if he actually knew his sources.

I believe this article comes across as fairly atheistic, mostly from the statement about Frodo not coming to the realization that there is no god. Well:

...the objection is that the people within the story have no religious beliefs or practices, and are thus unlike any real human society.

Either this statement proves he is not an atheist or Troll is contradicting his own belief. In any case Troll has never heard of communist Russia.

I hope to post more on this later but alas, my time is run out.