Moorcock, the anti-Tolkien?

Forest Shepherd wrote: Ugh. Moorcock again. The Dark Side of the Force, as it were.

  The Lord of the Rings is 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. Humanity was derided and marginalised. Sentimentality became the acceptable subsitute. So few people seem to be able to tell the difference.

  The Lord of the Rings is much more deep-rooted in its infantilism than a good many of the more obviously juvenile books it influenced. It is Winnie-the-Pooh posing as an epic.

 He sounds like a jaded post-modernist rejecting Tolkien and others of his style out of a frantic attempt to distance himself from the past out of a typically English self-loathing born of the singe unifying fact that the English have been insufferable idiots for the past few centuries. Defining oneself in terms of what one is not is, of course, his modus operandi here. Describing Tolkien's writing as being "short on wit but heavy on whimsy" is something I can never imagine myself agreeing with, and ignorant sounding stuff like the following just makes me bristly:

  The great epics dignified death, but they did not ignore it, and it is one of the reasons why they are superior to the artificial romances of which Lord of the Rings is merely one of the most recent.

One of the main themes of the Lord of the Rings is death. Moorcock argues that this theme is really just upper-class Thatcherism sentimentality, whatever the heck that is (I did not grow up during Thatcher's reign nor in England). I was going to go on a rant about how Tolkien was first and foremost a philologist and was primarily concerned with creating a "great epic" for England and went and borrowed quite heavily from Norse mythology and other sources in the pursuit of that aim (including much of Odin that can be found in Gandalf, who Moorcock dismisses as oppressively patriarchal in typically paranoid PC manner); but then I realized that Moorcock argues that all of this work is merely the attempts of a morally-bankrupt society to create a value system for itself that would assuage some of its own sense of pointlessness or some such bullcrap.

So I realized that any such rant would be pointless and stupid. Moorcock is smart, and a very talented author and, yes, his work in promoting the idea of the multiverse should be respected. However, just like the morons out there who define their musical tastes by avoiding whatever is popular (yeah, hipsters), Moorcock smells of contrarianism and self-satisfaction in the worst way.

It's probably this negative response that Tolkien fans have to Moorcock that is the main stumbling block to the purchasing of his rights by WotC. Or maybe they're just not interested, seeing as they have the gist of his work without having to access his controversial characters. By the by, what are we talking about here exactly? The creative rights to Moorcock's characters, or to his settings? Explain further please what you mean by the "Elric RPG license."

P.S. I can't help but be overly critical in my response to a discussion of Moorcock's contributions. As, for me (and this is not entirely justified), Moorcock symbolically represents all the shitty aspects of D&D that I dislike (evil characters, angsty settings like post-apocalyptic wastelands, moral ambiguity, neo-fantasy elements like Drow, and the incorporation of demons into the game), and Tolkien represents all the things about the game that appeal to me (wilderness exploration (love of nature), good vs. bad, epic questing, a love of wandering, the acquisition of jewels and weapons but a dismissal of the importance of said loot as an aim in itself, I could go on for a long time...).