Originally Posted by
JBI
What did he create? Look at his long bibliography - he just relocated things, he didn't create very much. Elves aren't his invention, and neither are Goblins - trolls, dragons, giants, even tree spirits are not his invention. Wizards surely aren't, and there have been little people for as long as there have been people, probably. Certainly the languages were an "invention", if we take grafting living or evolved languages into new forms - but even so, to what extent can we call that art?
We don't need to accept Tolkien's world making, and setting as anything special - the fact that he invented a style that many mediocre authors have mimicked doesn't attest to anything - the book Madame Chrysanthème by Pierre Loti, for instance, was adapted numerous times, had immense influence, and even laid the foundation for what is now the most preformed opera in the US, Madama Butterfly - is it a good novel? Hardly. IT sold well though, and its orientalist projection of Japan dominated for quite a long time, and even has, to an extent survived until this day, in various forms.
The point I will make, is that creating a fake world isn't art - what you do inside the world is the artistic part, and how you portray it - so, ultimately, bad prose, no matter how well drawn the setting of a story is, is still bad prose.