Do his novels contain any literary value whatsoever?

Anything that has to do with conflicts in human nature has some merit

bonus points if it adds an understanding of what it means to be human

What an absolute fucking pleb you are.

>LOTR is inspired by Catholicism
No, it is inspired by batholicism:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bathos

>literary value
What's the deal with this new meme?

Every once in while there's come a time in the life of a Veeky Forums fag that he needs to assert his adult gras of True Literature. At that moment, he will face Tolkien, if he is mature, he will recognize its value, if he's a complete Kylo Ren emo gay faggot he will try to throw Lord of The Rings under the bus, thinking he grew out of it.

>It's genre fiction
No it isn't, you fucking retard. The whole point of genre fiction is that it mostly follows standardized tropes and plotlines. This specific genre as we know it was shaped by LOTR. It's like saying the first ever detective novel is genre fiction because today we have billions of those.

The world was young, the mountains green,
No stain yet on the Moon was seen,
No words were laid on stream or stone
When Durin woke and walked alone.
He named the nameless hills and dells;
He drank from yet untasted wells;
He stooped and looked in Mirrormere,
And saw a crown of stars appear,
As gems upon a silver thread,
Above the shadow of his head.

The world was fair, the mountains tall,
In Elder Days before the fall
Of mighty kings in Nargothrond
And Gondolin, who now beyond
The Western Seas have passed away:
The world was fair in Durin's Day.

A king he was on carven throne
In many-pillared halls of stone
With golden roof and silver floor,
And runes of power upon the door.
The light of sun and star and moon
In shining lamps of crystal hewn
Undimmed by cloud or shade of night
There shone for ever fair and bright.

There hammer on the anvil smote,
There chisel clove, and graver wrote;
There forged was blade, and bound was hilt;
The delver mined, the mason built.
There beryl, pearl, and opal pale,
And metal wrought like fishes' mail,
Buckler and corslet, axe and sword,
And shining spears were laid in hoard.

Unwearied then were Durin's folk;
Beneath the mountains music woke:
The harpers harped, the minstrels sang,
And at the gates the trumpets rang.

The world is grey, the mountains old,
The forge's fire is ashen-cold;
No harp is wrung, no hammer falls:
The darkness dwells in Durin's halls;
The shadow lies upon his tomb
In Moria, in Khazad-dûm.
But still the sunken stars appear
In dark and windless Mirrormere;
There lies his crown in water deep,
Till Durin wakes again from sleep.

People fall for the genre fiction meme and think that reading The Hunger Games and The Lord of the Rings are the same thing, so they have to seek validation from anonymous literature nerds.

>It's fun genre fiction
Wrong
>elevated fantasy literature to a seriousness and an effortfulness
Wrong
What kind of shit reason is that? Lmao
A "new meme" that has existed since the 19th century
>This is what Tolkienfags actually believe

> this is what passes for a post on Veeky Forums

If you are familiar with Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavian literature, completely

love it.

unfortunately so

>What kind of shit reason is that? Lmao
You're either a troll or a fool if you think LOTR's Catholic inspiration has no literary value stemming from this specific personality lol

>You're either a troll or a fool
why not both?

>Tolkien invented fantasy
No

the person you're replying to said it "shaped" the genre, not invented it, you fucking moron

All Tolkien did was take tropes and cliches from folklore and fantasy and wrap them in a romance plot. Nothing impressive really

>he thinks all fiction can't be traced back to a predecessor

Absolutely OP. It's timeless in the fact that it's a decadent literary society's greatest literary achievement, and something that we would have a hard time reckoning with today. If someone asked you to create a world so vivid, so new, and yet so old and steeped in humanity, could you right now in this century come up with something as compelling as Middle Earth? It is important because although people today "know" far more than people in the past, even one hundred years ago, did, people like Tolkien existed in more learned, more storied, and more instinctively literary societies in their more true form, and this is one of the greatest pieces of evidence compelling that notion.

Second, I would say that beyond the surface level studying of how the story was able to come about, the author's ability to track very quickly into one of the most important vein's of thought throughout the coming centuries, and perhaps humanity's fate in time as a whole before all of this gets washed away by a coming singularity / eradication of human evolutionary needs of the past, in that he applies a metaphor to our world as a whole: the greeks that have sailed away, and the quiet, wholesome life of the anglo-saxon / northern european lineage coming under fire from a resurgence of the forgotten humanity that lies below, outside of the fortunate land of "middle earth." In his world, the problems we are too afraid or too weak to address and see now are eviscerated in their core existences, and serve as a springboard for a greater more fruitful tract of what it means to be human at all, a creation for which this trait will be increasingly valued as we fail more and more to come close to achieving it once more, in the twofold sense of both of the points I've raised: our literary humanity as a western culture, and our ethos as a western society that is on the brink of first being tarnished and then more swiftly too being swept away in favor of the nothingness that is to follow.

No, but in fairness no novel does.

What a sincerely abhorrent post. I hope in the future you'll feel embarrassed for posting this.

They promote goodness so yes.

Some legendary world building

His prose is far from awful you pretentious prick.