Well, as someone who played D&D from pretty much the very beginning, and pretty much learned to read by reading Tolkien I always thought it was hilariously disingenuous of Gary to claim that Tolkien wasn't the PRIMARY influence on D&D, the one that set the baseline expectations of play and of milieu. Granted, a lot of other stuff got thrown in there on top, but the core of it is at least significantly Tolkienesque. Even Gary's own Greyhawk setting aspires to some sort of grand view of history which echoes that. I mean, think about this, Howard, Leiber, etc. etc. etc. virtually never talk about the history of their worlds at all! Moorcock is an exception, but he's still not really attempting to build some sort of grand epic world arc. Gary is closer to JRRT than he is to Howard, flat out.
I think the core party-level tropes are JRRT: the races, some of the classes, the whole idea of a "fellowship".
But Gygax's worldbuilding has strong REH elements - the WoG backstory is fallen empires and racialised migrations of peoples with barbarians and desert nomads a dime-a-dozen. It also has JRRT elements with the Kron Hills and Celene and so on.
Ultimately I put it closer to REH than JRRT because, just as REH's world was created for storytelling in - it's purely a vehicle, a bucket into which he can dip to find tropes - so WoG is purely for RPGing in - a bucket into which players an GM can dip to find tropes.
I would second this. I don't think Gygax was trying to do Tolkien style world building at all. I do think others who followed and put out stuff for D&D were leaning heavily into Tolkien but a lot of Gygaxian D&D to me really fits those Conan stories. One key difference is Gygax seems to be aiming more for a medieval vibe than Conan (and Conan was more pre-historical Ancient World kitchen sink). But a lot of AD&D has that kitchen sink aspect. I would see stuff like Dragonlance as more connected to Tolkien
Bingo. I don't really see any signs that Gary was imitating Tolkien with his worldbuilding. Greyhawk absolutely bears a lot more similarities to REH's Hyborean Age than to Middle Earth, except that it's pushed forward to a quasi-medieval setting rather than Ancient World.
To the extent to which Gary defined dates and events into a more concrete historical record than REH did, IMO that's more due to his background in wargaming, medieval and military history than drawing on Tolkien. And related to his principle about wanting clear records and organized chronology for a campaign ("re: STRICT TIME RECORDS MUST BE KEPT" from the DMG).
Oh, yeah, that one I'd sort of forgotten, but yeah, each class really does kind of map to a specific character in something, but the only category that is entirely taken from one work is the races all coming from Tolkien. Especially when you realize that elves, dwarves, and halflings really don't appear in any of the other sources, or only in a rather different form (IE there are elves in other related works, but not Tolkienesque ones).
Well, EGG didn't like people pointing out that his races all came from JRRT, so he sort of post hoc tried to fudge up elves a bit. Gnomes are not a demi-human race pre-1e either, so a late addition in that way, as are half-elves I believe. Half-orcs may exist in some source pre-1e, but only become playable there as well. So the 'core' races seem to all start out as Tolkienesque for sure, and then Gary starts messing a bit with elves, adds gnomes, and obviously has to change hobbit to 'halfling'. I never understood why he was so annoyed by the whole races thing though. Gary was a quirky guy though...
Gnomes (up-scaled ripoffs of the
Gnomes from the very popular book released in English in 1977) first show up in the PH in 1978 alongside Half-Orcs (Tolkien). Half Elves appear in 1975's Greyhawk for OD&D, as you guys covered later, and again they're pretty damn Tolkien. The Broken Sword has changelings but they're not quite the same thing. The protagonist Skafloc is stolen and raised by the elves; it's been a while since I read it and I'm trying to remember if he actually transforms and becomes more elfish in powers and nature as a consequence of being raised by them. But even if he does, I don't THINK Anderson actually uses the term "half-elven" as Tolkien does with Elrond.
Well, and to reinforce this, there is NO OTHER SOURCE in Gary's famous list which does this! He COULD have listed Worm Ouroboros, which has kingdoms of what seem like different races, fairies, goblins, witches, etc. but they only seem to really differ in character traits, not physiology, from what I recall (maybe the witches had magic that the others didn't, I can't remember for sure). But Gary DID NOT list Worm Ouroboros! I can't even think of another similar work, maybe The King of Elfland's Daughter sort of comes close, though its goblins are still pretty much just boogymen.
Poul Anderson has elf and troll kingdoms capable of organizing into armies and making war in
The Broken Sword (1954), and in a more Chainmail-style assorted army form implied in Three Hearts & Three Lions. The "Faeries" described in Chain Mail are a bit of a more flexible exception to the obvious pattern of half the unit list in Chain Mail being clearly and directly lifted from Tolkien so you can play battles in Middle Earth. Tolkien never (to the best of my recollection) refers to his elves as fairies, while Anderson does. This nomenclature appears to be directly borrowed from Anderson.
Could be, it was introduced to D&D via the Greyhawk supplement, which was written entirely by EGG and didn't involve Dave, so its form was his choice. That was my point. I mean, I guess we could then attribute the Tolkienesque nature of the Ranger to EGG as well, since he chose to copy it verbatim from the magazine into the 1e PHB (well, its not quite verbatim, I believe there were a few changes to the spell casting). Many hands go into these things.
The Greyhawk supplement is by Gygax and Rob Kuntz, I'll note. Speaking of "many hands".
It really depends on what sources you use though. Sure, MODERN 'Merlins' are typically seen as wizards, but if you go back to the Celtic sources, they're much more like advisors, peace makers, and a sort of 'priest'. Its really unclear what the historical druids were, we really have nothing more than a couple paragraphs about them. So, yeah, it may be that the D&D druid owes something to neo-paganism, though I wonder which way the influence actually flowed...
I mean, I was around in the 1960s, and while neo-paganism WAS achieving some level of profile at that time, I don't think it had a huge impact on D&D. IME the confluence was more in the '80s when there was a LOT of crossover between D&D and SCA groups and such (of which a fair percentage were also Wiccans). Of course, not knowing much about Dave in that respect, it is quite possible he was inspired by neo-pagan sources or was himself exposed to it.
That would depend on which source you are using for Merlin. At the time that D&D was created the "current" version of Merlin was Disney's version of T.H. White's Sword in the Stone.
Right. Star-spangled robe, laboratory, wand, book-learnin'.
Merlin in popular culture was VERY wizardy at the time D&D was gathering concepts. Merlin as druid I think is a later conceptualization, arising after people dug more into Myrddin (himself one of the mythic figures Geoffrey of Monmonth and others seemingly amalgamated to create Merlin) and Taliesin in the late 20th century. The first place I can remember "Merlins" plural, it being a title rather than a unique person, was MZB's Mists of Avalon from 1983.
