This post could be misinterpreted as inflammatory. It isn't intended as such - please imagine it said in calm, reasonable - and British! - tones. (For maximum effect, imagine it said over a pint of Theakston's Old Peculiar in a comfortable pub near Cambridge, at about 10:30pm on a wet Thursday.)
There's something rather disturbing about seeing Gary Gygax telling us that he's not over-enamoured of JRRT.
I mean, you're the chap who wrote the game system featuring everything from orcs and goblins, through halflings and thousand-year-old elves, past trolls and treants, round the corner where the werebears and giant eagles hang out, down the corridor as far as undead wights and giant hairy wolves called "worgs" (sic) - but you're telling us you don't actually like the Professor's work?
I mean, for an author you didn't like, you certainly helped yourself to a lot of his material! I see bits of Fritz Leiber, bits of REH, a fair bit of Vance, but absolutely heaps of JRRT in D&D.
(Okay, Tolkein actually took much of his material from older sources which, in theory, you and Dave Arneson might conceivably have consulted entirely independently. Nevertheless there are clear clues that AD&D came from Tolkein and not from what little survives of Dark Age Saxon and Viking literature - check, for example, the prevalence of half-elves and half-orcs, or the very telltale misspelling of "dwarfs" - "dwarves" is a form used throughout D&D and Tolkein, and in literature derivative of these two corpuses, but it's not in the dictionary).
If you prefer REH to JRRT, why include Orcs in the game but not Picts?
See the more extensive bibliography in the DJ Mythus rules for that sort of reading list.![:]](http://www.enworld.org/forum/images/smilies/devious.png "Devious :]")
