Alright, we get it. You consider yourself a Tolkien purist. You get offended at the slightest retouching of the LOTR story, you don't like any of the art that's been produced over the years and you're thoroughly ticked off at any "Middle-earth" game like LOTRO, Battle for Middle-earth, and others. And you absolutely hate it when someone adds to the world in some way. You have bought and read every volume of The History of Middle-earth in addition to The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, The Silmarillion, and The Children of Hurin. As far as you're concerned, there is nothing else. Tolkien's world should be left in stasis, just the way it's creator left it.
The question is, have you actually read Tolkien's letters?
For example, in "A Letter by J.R.R. Tolkien to Milton Waldman, 1951", Tolkien states, "I had a mind to make a body of more or less connected legend, ranging from the large and cosmogonic, to the level of romantic fairy-story...I would draw some of the great tales in fullness, and leave many only placed in the scheme, and sketched. The cycles should be linked to a majestic whole, and yet leave scope for other minds and hands, wielding paint and music and drama." (emphasis mine)
It would seem that the man himself was in favour of having others add to his work, bringing many of the seeds he planted to fruition in their own time.
Now, there are two groups of people who play in Tolkien's world; those who add to his world and those who edit his story, I'll give a few brief thoughts on both below.
First, to those who add to Tolkien's world: This would seem to be in keeping with the man's most profound desire for his world. From the artists who have shaped and sculpted Middle-earth and its many denizens into being over the decades, to those who have written fan fiction attempting to add subtle things to the world, Tolkien s' world has grown and I believe he would have been deeply flattered to see the great homage that has been paid to his work.
Secondly, those who seek to edit, to reinvent and twist what Tolkien created. These are people who are willing to take what has been made and remake it in their own image, so to speak. The end result is a product which is not Tolkien, although it may at times resemble it.
I will be blunt in my own opinion here. I put Peter Jackson's work, first in his Lord of the Rings film trilogy and then, more recently, in his film adaptations of The Hobbit, firmly in the second category. While I was willing to forgive much of the license he took in LOTR, his work on the Hobbit has been somewhere between insulting and disgusting and should not even bear the same name. For the sake of space I will not go into details on this further, but I suspect most of you know what I mean. The work, and indeed the world, is no longer Tolkien's, but Jackson's, and the gulf between them has grown wide.
Lord of the Rings Online, or LOTRO, is a very different animal in this regards. It has sought to be as accurate as possible in it's portrayal of the War of the Ring storyline, while making adjustments to the world to allow an assortment of diverse classes to exist in the game in such a manner as to allow players to interact with that central story, but without altering it, at least more than would be necessary.
In short, I believe that LOTRO has been quite faithful to the world Tolkien created, at least as much as can be expected of a Massively Multiplayer Role Playing Game, and while I may not agree with every decision which the game developers and producers have decided upon, when I play I get the feeling that I'm in Tolkien's Middle-earth, not Turbine's and certainly not Peter Jackson's!
So while being a purist isn't a bad thing, per se, maybe it's time to draw a line between the purists and the obstinate, inflexible Fundamentalists who refuse to allow Tolkien's vision for his own world to exist. If you happen to be in that crowd, maybe it's time for you to move on to other games that you're a bit less...sensitive...about and let the rest of us continue to play in Tolkien's world.
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