Epic Pooh

wrote the essay "Epic Pooh". "Epic Pooh" was included in Moorcock's 1989 book Wizardry and Wild Romance. Revisions A 2008 revision to the piece adds a mention of the author J. K. Rowling and drops those whose names had become less familiar. In an author's note, Moorcock also identifies Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials as deserving credit. As an example of the revision, from the original and from the revised version == Analysis ==

The essay has been criticised by multiple authors from different backgrounds. "Epic Pooh" and Edmund Wilson's essay "Oo, Those Awful Orcs" have been called "infamous negative criticisms" of Tolkien. Ishay Landa calls "Epic Pooh" a "prototypical critique" of Tolkien's supposedly "'complacent' escapism", in which Moorcock views Tolkien as "essentially a conservative, soothing container of social tensions." Richard Forest notes Moorcock's "famously dim view of Tolkien's moral and aesthetic vision". Thomas Ingram states that "Epic Pooh" is "unfair to Tolkien at many points", but that Tolkien's ideas of race were indeed "noxious". The Tolkien scholar David Bratman writes that "one wonders what book Moorcock read, because it's certainly not The Lord of the Rings." Madawc Williams, in the Tolkien Society's journal Mallorn, comments that "Moorcock has simply sneered at Tolkien without knowing what he is talking about," describing the essay as "a shallow work; the ramblings of a light-weight thinker with a fairly average knowledge of literature." == Legacy ==

The science fiction author China Miéville has in the scholar of literature Eric Sandberg's view adopted Moorcock's "critique of Tolkien's conservative politics". Sandberg notes that Moorcock called The Lord of the Rings "a pernicious confirmation of the values of a declining nation with a morally bankrupt class whose cowardly self-protection is primarily responsible for the problems England answered with the ruthless logic of Thatcherism," while Miéville mentions Tolkien's "small-minded and reactionary love for hierarchical status-quos" and "belief in absolute morality that blurs moral and political complexity". == References ==