This Washington Post review of J.R.R. Tolkien's The Children of Hurin opens with this lede:

If anyone still labors under the delusion that J.R.R. Tolkien was a writer of twee fantasies for children, this novel should set them straight. A bleak, darkly beautiful tale played out against the background of the First Age of Tolkien's Middle Earth, The Children of Hurin possesses the mythic resonance and grim sense of inexorable fate found in Greek tragedy.

After reading the Lord of the Rings novels, after seeing the Peter Jackson movies, could anyone -- anyone -- really think that Tolkien's works were "fantasies for children"?

While one might be able to draw that conclusion solely from reading The Hobbit, reading more than a handful of pages into The Fellowship of the Ring should have convinced anyone that this was not simply a fairy tale. It nothing else, there shear breadth and weight of revealed and implied history should have crushed such ideas from people's heads, no matter how dense they might be. Throw in the epic tale of power that corrupts absolutely, and no one -- even a literary reviewer -- could accuse Tolkien of being children's literature.

And yet, I suppose they could, as this lede reveals that the bias against science fiction and fantasy remains strong in the mainstream press. Simply being in either genre automatically relegates even the most literary tale to the children's section of the library. I thought we might be beyond this now, at least for Tolkien, but clearly I was wrong.