no beautiful things

There’s this line in The Hobbit that haunts me. For one thing, it is part of a wider problematic habit running throughout all of Tolkien that, moving in the mythopoetic space, leads to these sweeping statements that define or collapse an entire culture into a single stroke. It seems to me to be like the most damning thing you could say about a culture, though: Now goblins are cruel, wicked, and…