Tolkien took over fantasy, but is he any good?

Have we reached peak J.R.R.Tolkien oversaturation? The Tolkien estate has been doling out licenses for tv shows, games, movies, books and toys like they’re rings of power.

We once knew little about the mysterious world of Middle-earth — now we might know far too much.Enter into this fray “The King Under the Mountain: In Search of J.R.R.Tolkien” by the British author D.J.

Taylor, an excellent and unauthorized biography of the creator of “Lord of the Rings” and the “Hobbit.” Taylor is a fully paid-up, although thankfully discerning, Tolkien obsessive, and has been since childhood.“I wanted to take another look at a particular hero of my early teen-dom using all the critical and interpretative tools I’ve picked up in the intervening years with the aim of seeing whether my attitude toward [Tolkien] had changed,” Taylor told The Post.In other words: he wanted to see whether Tolkien is actually any good or just good if you’re a teenage boy.Tolkien inspires not just love but obsession among fanatical readers of all backgrounds.

I’ve never been a fan.I share the judgment of Tolkien’s fellow author, Hugo Dyson, who once loudly moaned, “Oh no, not another f–king elf!” as he listened to a passage from “Lord of the Rings.”Yet it’s undeniable that Tolkien changed fantasy forever.

It’s impossible to imagine the genre without him.He used his deep study of Anglo-Saxon and Middle English to research obscure and forgotten texts and to bring them into his richly detailed universe of, as Taylor writes, “hobbits, elves, dwarves, orcs and men and women who in most respects behave as if they have just walked out of a medieval tapestry.”As for the man himself, he maintained a vague figure and gave the impression of being a man from another time, one who managed to resist the age in which he lived to admirable effect — a juxtaposition that Taylor is both perceptive and entertaining about.

Tolkien was especially bothered by the idea of “...