@noodlehead710, yeah, that’s my favorite thing about it too. The mythology, for the most part, is really complex, and “realistic” in the sense that you have these magical entities acting in their own interests.
But it’s still really Catholicy for my tastes. I mean, Sauron and Melkor are cartoonishly evil. Tolkien, despite the pagan setting, can’t get passed the whole Catholic idea of a monotheistic god (Iluvatar) and a Fall (both Melkor, the dark elves, and the Numenoreans).
And the Orcs (and, to some extent, the Southrons) are treated as cartoonishly evil, thus allowing for the “heroes” to slaughter them by the thousands with absurd counting games. In the books, Tolkien mimics the style of genocidal Biblical battles, awed descriptions of how the good guys slew “6,000.”
I mean, compare that to mythology like in the Iliad or the Hindu epics. War isn’t some victorious counting game in those works, it’s a very morally ambiguous and ultimately destructive behavior. The “bad guys” in those stories (the Trojans, the Kauravas, even the demons in the Ramayana) act honorably and have their own heroes. But you won’t find any of that moral ambiguity in much of LOTR.
Especially when it comes to racially pure “heroes” like Aragorn whose magic power comes from “pure” bloodlines versus swarms of bestial, dark-skinned monsters who can be massacred mindlessly.
Robert E. Howard > JRR Tolkien
/LOTR rant