Quite a few passages from LOTR stand out to me, but one that holds a special place in my heart is this one from ROTK, when a completely exhausted Sam lies down amid the lifeless rocks and ash of Mordor. He's totally beat, pretty much on the verge of collapse, and then...

The beauty of it smote his heart, as he looked up out of the forsaken land, and hope returned to him. For like a shaft, clear and cold, the thought pierced him that in the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was light and high beauty forever beyond its reach.

I can't think of anything Martin or Pullman have written that struck me like those sentences did. Truly it's no wonder crass, cynical materialists and second-rate authors like GRRM and Pullman resent this dude so much and hope to take his place in readers' hearts; they can't make anything quite like what he made, because even this single passage impresses upon us the existence of immaterial things worth fighting for - indeed of greater worth than anything in our fleeting material world - while such things are antithetical to their worldview, and does so with greater grace than both of them combined could hope to have.

Oh, but I can go a level deeper than even that. Who is the lord of Mordor? Sauron. What are Sauron and his boss Morgoth best known for? Besides being archetypical fantasy dark lords, they originally created orcs by mangling and twisting captive elves, tearing every bit of goodness from them until all that's left is ugly cruelty, seething hatred and a total lack of belief in any higher power but the master who rules them. Sauron did this and wages war on the Free Peoples of Middle-earth in the name of imposing rationality and order, Morgoth did it because he's just a destructive spiteful asshat.

And now we have Martin, who thinks he can beat out Tolkien by writing medieval fantasy based on LOTR but 'darker and edgier', meaning hollow, cynical and full of pretenses of being 'realistic' when it's actually uglier than our real Middle Ages; and Pullman, who seeks to attack C. S. Lewis' books about kids having adventures against a fantastic backdrop full of religious allegories by making a fantasy work of his own where God is both evil & impotent, rationality and freedom (as defined by a modern antitheist progressive) are the things to aspire to past the controlling oppression of the church, and the at-best barely pubescent male & female leads are implied to have sex at the end.

Yeah, can't imagine why those two might get assblasted at any comparisons to Sauron, or more generally when their works are compared to the ones they totally didn't rip off & try to 'deconstruct'!