Blame Tolkien's World War I trauma, with which he coped by writing a series of therapeutic novels where ethical nuance quite understandably wasn't on the menu - novels which inadvertently inspired a genre that has tended mostly to be more of the same sort of flight from modernity, but without the originator's nigh peerless world-building skill.

(I used to write Quenya and Sindarin in the tengwar! Probably still could; I'm sure I kept those notes. Brilliant languages, if heavily systematized in the same unrealistic way as Esperanto. But I still to this day can't make it through the main trilogy without running out of patience. Would you believe, I used to think I was the one with the problem?)

Just finished reading the whole LOTR series to my daughter night after night. It is very long winded, yes. But she actually had little problem with it, and she actually preferred the portions that many consider long winded and tangential (Bombadil and Scouring of the Shire for example) But he was trying to do something with the English language that others haven't got, trying to bring back an Anglo-Saxon poetics to it. It is quite lovely when read aloud, tho the landscape descriptions... oh my long winded.

But yeah, the good vs evil stuff is pretty ham-fisted and always was. And there's some pretty racist stuff in there.