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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 7903915" data-attributes="member: 42582">Where does this come from? No one on this thread has said they hate Tolkien or that they hate Shakespeare.But JRRT's work is not tradition - it is adaptation and invention (as he discusses in some detail in his work on fairy stories). And it can't be true both that GH involves some sort of contrastp with high or romantic fantasy and that it is bound by Tolkien's limits.As presented in AD&D (which is the context in which GH was first published) dwarves were almost entirely derivative of JRRT, and elves close to. Half-elves are straight from Tolkien, as are hobbits, orcs and half-orcs (like the spy at Bree).But GH needn't be limited to Tolkien, and in many ways is not well-suited to it because evil in GH is somewhat diffuse rather than all the result of the Fall.Not only does Chainmail have hobbits, but it has tribes of Orcs identified in Tolkien-esque terms, like White Hand, Lidless Eye, etc. In AD&D these became the tribes mentioned in the MM (Vile Rune, Broken Bone etc) which in turn became the holy symbols of the Orc gods when Roger E Moore published The Orcish Point of View in Dragon.JRRT was a scholar of Germanic languages and was intimately familiar with that folklore in its primary sources. He published a famous scholarly treatment of Beowulf.I don't think it's really apposite to compare Gygax's knowledge of folklore to Tolkien's.In 3rd Age Middle Earth what great deeds did elves achieve? I think it should be quite possible to have a RPG that accurately represents JRRT's elves and is still quite playable. Burning Wheel goes at least some of this way.D&D obviously isn't that RPG, but this is a result of particular features of D&D and the way PC build feeds into action resolution.</blockquote>

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