Continuing this thought.

On one famed island in hereabouts looms the fortress of Michael Moorcock, who made his name by reversing every trope coined by Robert E. Howard. Howard’s Conan was a barbarian; Moorcock’s Elric was an over-refined aesthete from a corrupt civilization. Conan was bronzed brawny; Elric was pale and sickly; and so on.

There is also a strong element of rebellion of Moorcock against Tolkien. Tolkien’s universe has a Dark Lord, whose represents all the evils of the mechanized modern age, the love of power for its own sake, the contempt for nature, and yet also represents an eternal evil; and opposing this darkness is a clear and piercing light, sometimes literally seen in the radiance of the phial of Galadriel, sometimes adumbrated as the light in the West that calls to the dying elves, a divine light. Moorcock substituted for the concise dichotomy of Light and Shadow a meaningless and endless rivalry between Law and Chaos, both equally deadly to man, should either prove the victor. Because the moralistic element is absent, replaced by a nihilism by turns melancholic, morose, ironic or inhuman, the Moorcockian body of work never rises above the level of a Conan story. It is not serious, and has no wisdom to impart to a grown-up. A fantasy of despair is no less juvenile than Howardian power-fantasies.

via johncwright: The Elf-Thirst for Waters Beyond the World.

Absolutely right.