[knivesout]

Yes, Moorcock's Tolkien-bashing itself is something I'm not totally comfortable with, as I've enjoyed Tolkien's works myself.

Thing is, Moorcock has always had a flair for opposing established norms and perhaps this should be seen purely as a needful gadfly-ism rather than a final verdict on the works he attacks. The Elric stories, for instance, were written pretty consciously as an anti-Conan fare, and yet they function as sword-and-sorcery classics themselves, and haven't in any way made Robert E Howard's tales less worthy of enjoyment.

I think Moorcock overestimates Tolkien's influence, though not his stature.

For instance, another writer who consciously worked in a non-Tolkienesque mode was Fritz Leiber, who in one introduction to The Swords of Lankhmar, a novel about his own swords-and-sorcery duo, Fafhrd and Grey Mouser, clearly states that his work is non-Tolkienesque in moral tone, and draws more on the likes of ER Edisson. And yet, much of the content of these works has been hugely influential on the fantasy genre, and allied areas like RPGs. A lot of the cliches of adventure-oriented fantasy fare were first created by Leiber, rather than Tolkien! Then there's Jack Vance, whose The Dying Earth had a deep influence on the developers of Dungeons & Dragons, which again has shaped a lot of the tropes of the written genre itself.

To an extent, I feel Moorcock's focus on Tolkien undermines his justified attack on the failings of the genre by making it seem you have to choose to side either with Tolkien and Moorcock, a black-and-white divide of just the sort Moorcock so deplores!