SHANNARA

[Sacrosanct]

Still, no, even though that's not what you said in your last post. "Der Ring der Nibelungen" is neither folklore nor mythology. It's a musical cycle loosely based on a mix of sources, most notably the Nibelungenlied.

Note that I'm not trying to defend a position of 'Tolkien's work was totally original', I'm just objecting to your line of argument and choice of terms.

You simply cannot compare what Terry Brooks did with his Shannara cycle to Tolkien's approach. About the only thing in common is that they both ended up writing novels.

Still yes Both Tolkien and Wagner pulled from existing myth without changing much about the overall plot. See the aforementinoed Saga. And at the very least, the amount of similarities from Brooks to Tolkien are no more than the similarities from Tolkien to Wagner. I.e., even if you disregard all the similarities Tolkien took from existing myth and folklore, it can easily be argued that Tolkien is more of a copy of Wagner's work than Brooks is of Tolkien's.* But all we hear is how Brooks ripped off Tolkien, when Tolkien wasn't any better, or even worse. I'm guessing it's because everyone knows Tolkien, but not nearly as many know Wagner's work.

So yeah, I can compare the two. It's also a bit disengenous to use the entire "Shannara cycle", since the other dozen or so books set in the Four Lands are all unique and don't have anything similar to Tolkien in them.


*What did Brooks take from Tolkien? Elves and dwarves in a fantasy setting with an all-powerful wizard like character? A collection of these races to go on a quest to save the world from a big bad demon like creature?

And what did Tolkien take from Wagner? One ring of power to rule them all, and a shattered sword as key plot items? At least Brooks had the sense to file off the serial numbers at least lol.

 

[Ryujin]

If we're going to say that X stole the story from Y because the story starts with a naive hero who travels, searches for/to destroy a MacGuffin, has various faerie races, and ends with a far more experienced hero then we're going to spend an awful long time trying to figure out which of a few thousand authors first stole the story.

 

[Sacrosanct]

If we're going to say that X stole the story from Y because the story starts with a naive hero who travels, searches for/to destroy a MacGuffin, has various faerie races, and ends with a far more experienced hero then we're going to spend an awful long time trying to figure out which of a few thousand authors first stole the story.

Nah, they can all really be traced back to mythology and folklore. Some writers put a new spin on things, or add something creative, and they should be commended on that, but most of it ties back to centuries old stories. The heroic journey is pretty old. Yeah, Sword of Shannara was inspired by LoTR. But I find it a bit disengenous for some people to say Brooks ripped off Tolkien while at the same time turning a blind eye to Tolkien doing the same thing, is all, if you consider what Brooks did to be "ripping off" instead of "inspired by".

 

[Dioltach]

I think it's important to realise that The Sword of Shannara was selected for publication by Lester del Rey in an effort to establish fantasy as a recognised genre, and that one of the reasons why he chose it was in fact because of its similarities to The Lord of the Rings. Those similarities* carried over to subsequent publications that formed and defined the genre.

FWIW, Terry Brooks himself fully acknowledges the similarities (remember, they served to establish heroic fantasy as a genre), but he highlights one similarity in particular that most people tend to overlook: the use of an "everyman" protagonist, as opposed to a powerful warrior or wizard.

* Perhaps the most recognisable was that "fantasy should come in trilogies": the late 1970s and the 1980s were the era of the original Shannara "trilogy", the Dragonlance trilogies, the Rose of the Prophet trilogy, the Darksword trilogy, the countless Forgotten Realms trilogies. I seem to remember that when Weiss & Hickman started writing their Death Gate Cycle they explicitly announced that it wouldn't be a trilogy, and when Robert Jordan published The Dragon Reborn (vol. 3 of The Wheel of Time) everyone I knew was amazed that he hadn't finished the story.