The real horror for Tolkein would probably have been that there were people writing about him who could not tell Old English from Old Norse

The real horror for Tolkein would probably have been that there were people writing about him who could not tell Old English from Old Norse, and genuinely thought the difference didn’t matter. If he got past that, he would have discovered writers contentedly using those cribs and ‘substitutes for proper food’ he had excoriated in his 1940 ‘Preface’, tracing his thoughts through flattening, second-hand, language-less and usually wildly incorrect ‘Encylopaedias of Mythology’. The end produce of book after book, meanwhile, is a scheme: The Lord of the Rings reduced to ‘archetypes’, related to solemn trudging plots of ‘departure and return’, ‘initiation, donor and trial’ hutching over banalities like ‘for every good… there is a corresponding evil’.

T. Shippey, The road to Middle-Earth (3rd edition. 2005), 381