The Amazon series is essentially bad fan fiction; it just has a big budget and mass-market ambitions. Happily it also has a paywall and one can decline to pay. Nothing can touch The Lord of the Rings itself (though some of Tolkien's own revisions for the Ballantine edition come close - it's too bad he was put in the position of having to make them, in a hurry and so much later when he was out of touch with the writing, and moreover had spent years consciously explaining the book's theological underpinnings to readers. He didn't bring his best to the work).
"Decanonizing" Tolkien might also reduce the tendency of fans and scholars to claim him for either the right or the left. People on both sides need to break rank and recognize that reality transcends ideology. More or less as with the Bible, you can find anything (almost) in Tolkien's work if you look for it, but why are the stakes so high? Why can't he just be a man who condemned racism in several clear statements but whose invented world had a racial hierarchy of sorts, with significant intermarriages and friendships that crossed those boundaries? Even hard-right and hard-left people aren't perfectly consistent if they stop to look at themselves. And nobody writing an imaginative work can satisfy ideological claims without killing the imagination.
All that said, I think he did do miracles - for me and for a lot of other children who might otherwise never have developed a sense of beauty and gratitude rising to the level of the religious (whether inside or outside of established religions). For which, perhaps, his sins are forgiven.
The Amazon series is essentially bad fan fiction; it just has a big budget and mass-market ambitions. Happily it also has a paywall and one can decline to pay. Nothing can touch The Lord of the Rings itself (though some of Tolkien's own revisions for the Ballantine edition come close - it's too bad he was put in the position of having to make them, in a hurry and so much later when he was out of touch with the writing, and moreover had spent years consciously explaining the book's theological underpinnings to readers. He didn't bring his best to the work).
"Decanonizing" Tolkien might also reduce the tendency of fans and scholars to claim him for either the right or the left. People on both sides need to break rank and recognize that reality transcends ideology. More or less as with the Bible, you can find anything (almost) in Tolkien's work if you look for it, but why are the stakes so high? Why can't he just be a man who condemned racism in several clear statements but whose invented world had a racial hierarchy of sorts, with significant intermarriages and friendships that crossed those boundaries? Even hard-right and hard-left people aren't perfectly consistent if they stop to look at themselves. And nobody writing an imaginative work can satisfy ideological claims without killing the imagination.
All that said, I think he did do miracles - for me and for a lot of other children who might otherwise never have developed a sense of beauty and gratitude rising to the level of the religious (whether inside or outside of established religions). For which, perhaps, his sins are forgiven.