The latter explains a great deal more than the rant (an old atheist friend's adoration of Elric, for example.) The essay is... unfortunate. Tolkien and his ilk, as it were, are derided for substituting sentimentality for humanity; Moorcock then goes on to defend Sauron on the grounds "anyone who hates hobbits can't be all bad." This shortly after accusing Tolkien and the others of hypocrisy. He apologizes for neglecting newer works on the grounds that his last substantial revision was in the late seventies (then proceeds to analyze works from the eighties for half the essay with no mention of Tolkien, apparently just an extended way of saying, "all this is so much better than that drivel".) Despite these revisions he still complains about a work featuring "a big bear who dies four our sins." Either this is a poorly worded indictment of bears slaying sins by the quartet, or he needs another revision; perhaps he was distracted by a focus on Tolkien "tak[ing] words seriously but without pleasure" (inexplicably, he cites the Silmarillion as an example, despite a diction that's lovely and can only be called "epic.") He calls Tolkien misanthropic and a favorable critic a snob, but his chief objection seems to be that Tolkien and others believe things he thinks naive and childish and this makes them Bad, not only them, but the ENTIRE CLASS of sub-humans they represent. You can see him bristling at charges of intellectualism Tolkien never makes (the man was Oxford Professor of English, for heaven's sake!) yet he exhibits all the classic signs of superiority taken for granted that makes the unwashed so annoyed with their patronizing intellectual who style themselves their "betters."

All that is small potatoes: To say TLotR ignores death not only misses the point of the Trilogy, but of Christianity. Though, once again, it seems obvious in light of this essay as well as his own fiction that Moorcock does that quite amazingly. Now, if you'll excuse me, I believe my mind needs a shower. At least one.

EDIT: Murphy's rebuttal contains another excellent point: Moorcock castigates Tolkien for insisting on happy endings despite having read the Silmarillion, where the Valar arrive to defeat Morgoth only after nearly every hero of Middle-Earth lies slain in heaps, and far from lacking tension as Moorcock alleges, the tension between old and new is as strong as that between good and evil throughout the Trilogy (which, as Murphy also notes, doesn't have a happy ending, but a far more realistic bittersweet one.) Really, it's no surprise Moorcock is a Pullman fan; his disingenuous polemic masquerading as a criticism of perceived polemic could be the latter's inspiration.

He flat out MISSES THE POINT. Perhaps we should literally take a page from his essay and ask ourselves, given the inherent superiority of the intellectual over the bourgeois, whether the fault lies in the Oxford Professor of English or the man who tells us, "I was playing guitar in a whorehouse at the age of 15 not because I was that good on the guitar or that sexy, but because I got on well with the girls and they liked me.... I have been invited in to the English Literature world, too, but haven't been very comfortable in their churches. " Apostates rarely are.