Oversimplification of the Critics

"[Some] critics label the heroes of The Lord of the Rings as simplistically moral, yet the antiheroes of most modern novels are much more simplistically immoral or amoral. It is the critics who are one-sided; Tolkien sees both the good and the evil sides better and deeper than they do."
...
"Tolkien is not a psychological absolutist, but a moral absolutist: no person is absolutely good or evil; but goodness and evil are themselves absolutely distinct. He believes that 'there's a little good in the worst of us and a little bad in the best of us'; but not that there's a little good in evil and a little evil in good. He believes in human moral complexity but not in logical moral complexity.... If that is his offense in the eyes of the critics, that tells us little about Tolkien but much about the critics."

-Peter J. Kreeft, The Philosophy of Tolkien