Originally Posted by Tuco
Originally Posted by KillerRabbit
I think Tolkein, despite his denials, did have a moral message to deliver. I think his denials were product of trying to distinguish himself from C.S. Lewis and to get from the whole Tom Bombadil controversy.
I think we are making some confusion here.
Tolkien never denied that his story "had a message" (or more than one, really). He just refused two specific claims: that it was meant as a Christian allegory or a as an attempt to draw a direct parallel with World War 2.
he also said more than once that he never tried to draw any parallel with the real world and he personally wasn't a fan of the approach of "telling X to actually talk about Y".
That of course doesn't mean that there isn't a "a moral" (or again, more than one) intertwined in its narrative. Then again it's basically impossible to write any work of fiction that tries to express ANY idea without at least a part of it being implicitly "a moral message" (or being interpretable as one).

But that's not even what I was talking about.
I was explicitly referring to how a lot of modern revisionists love to downplay his writings as "lacking in moral nuance" (which is possibly questionable in general) given the fact that "good and evil" were easy to tell apart.

You're right. That is exactly the statements I was thinking of and I was thinking of his statements distancing himself from C.S. Lewis and your interpretation of his words is more nuanced than mine.

So we agree that Tolkien had a moral message and that his moral view is actually quite nuanced. The belief in inherent good and evil does not mean than one's analysis is simpler.

The irony that people like our good historian want to make every battle into a battle over Manichean reduction but they themselves commit the sin of reductionism by transforming nuanced accounts into cartoons versions of Manicheanism.