Epic Pooh

This article or section is about a topic that is particularly prone to Skub (that is, really loud and/or stupid arguments). Edit at your own risk, and read with a grain of salt, as skubby subjects have a bad habit of causing stupid, even in neutrals trying to summarize the situation.

Epic Pooh is Michael Moorcock's essay on why he really, really does not like JRR Tolkien (nor CS Lewis, nor Richard Adams) despite working in the same field and with, in some cases, the same post-mythic characters. Moorcock doesn't respect Milne either, hence the hee-hee scatological title.

The essay was composed in 1970, "last substantially revised" in 1977, tweaked again 1989; sporadically updated to add more-modern authors like Adams. Moorcock thought that Things Needed Saying so kept this one at the forefront of his oeuvre, as an apologia for Moorcock's own approach to Fantasy.

Overall this essay flags the Inklings (and Milne, and lately Adams) for their overt nostalgia for a bygone world of a safe and secure Shire ruled benevolently by 19th-century Anglican Tories. Aesthetically Moorcock allows that Tolkien's prose can be good but complains that it often isn't. (He's certainly aware that Tolkien, like Chesterton, was no Anglican but a bloody Papist; but this essay leaves such detail aside.) Moorcock asserts that Lord of the Rings is a Romance which has betrayed Romanticism.

It is Moorcock's view that fantasy literature should not just "offer us escape" but also should "force us at least to ask questions". Tolkien, in his mind, does not do this. (Some might respectfully suggest that Tolkien is leading his readers to ask different questions.)

Moorcock refuses to be strawmanned as a hater of childrens'-lit. He had read some of it up to 1970 and continued to read more of it over the 1970s as more of it came to his notice. Namechecked in the work are Frank L Baum, E Nesbit and (as the decades roll on) Ursula Le Guin, Susan Cooper, JK Rowling, and Philip Pullman. One suspects the man would have approved Roald Dahl as well. Moorcock objects to Inkling/Milne-lit, as being bad at addressing children, by contrast to Baum and Nesbit.

Moorcock's essay has trenchant comments about middle-class life in England, who have sinned in his eyes for taking holidays in Bournemouth on account they can't afford Spain. But Moorcock is not a snob, just ask him; he attacks (for one) Gore Vidal for snobbery.

Anyway you can read the 21st-century version of the essay here: https://web.archive.org/web/20080324100956/http://www.revolutionsf.com/article.php?id=953