The Lord of the Rings fails to introduce any strong women? Is the article writer (or Pullman) confusing Rings with The Hobbit? Eowyn alone makes a nonsense of the claim, and while most Tolkien characters are male, there is enough material in the mythos for me to write a four part blog series on this very subject ( ) Pullman, who has given fantasy literature a memorable heroine like Lyra Belacqua, has also often pointed out how Tolkien’s famous book had failed to introduce any strong woman character, and the Narnia series has been ‘disparaging towards women’. All told, it is not a stupid work, though it is often frustrating, and I don’t think it quite achieves its ambitions. Gnostic Narnia would be closer to the mark, and it is possible (depending on your interpretation of Dust) to read Pullman’s trilogy from either a theistic or an atheistic perspective. On the other hand, His Dark Materials is also not simply the Atheistic Narnia that so many lazy commentators pigeon-hole it as. I was simply not interested in Lyra’s relationship with her daemon, at least compared to the rest of the story. I remember feeling frustrated that Pullman had written a story with armoured polar bears and a War Against God, and yet somehow contrived to make it boring. In terms my own experience with Pullman’s work, I have read His Dark Materials once, back in 2012 or so. It also demonstrates Pullman’s ideological bugbears, which in contrast to Moorcock’s obsession with the smug English bourgeoisie, are much more tied-up with authoritarianism and religion. He has been making waves again in the last week with another interview broadside at Tolkien, and while it can be waved away as another Epic Pooh (and probably should), it is at least currently topical in 2021. Philip Pullman is another genre provocateur, at least so far as his comments on the Inklings go. I don’t think ideological echo-chambers are healthy). (For myself, I happen to think reading books you disagree with is to be encouraged.
And seeing as it first came out in 1978, there is little new to be added to the discussion.
It’s a trolling piece, that gets the geekdom’s blood flowing, but which is fundamentally uninteresting in terms of literary analysis. Each to their own, I suppose, though seeing as Epic Pooh really boils down to “this book expresses opinions I disagree with,” I have never felt Moorcock’s essay merited any serious attention. Michael Moorcock springs to mind, with the much-beaten dead horse that is the Epic Pooh essay. There are some genre authors who like to demonstrate their edgy, iconoclastic credentials by sticking the boot into J.R.R.
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