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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Turjan" data-source="post: 3015546" data-attributes="member: 3477">Eh. Even Tolkien had very different views of fantasy races in his different publications. Just look at the elves from "The Hobbit" and compare them to the elves from LotR. Those elves from "The Hobbit" are much nearer to folklore than his later concepts. They live under a hill, dance in the moonlight and drink lots of wine in their constant partying. There's also a distinct cruel streak. This fits very much Irish folk tales as they have been collected by the Grimm brothers in 1826. This is completely different from the elven image in the LotR. In principle, you could accuse Tolkien to have left the ground of folklore, because that's what he did. His LotR elves are his unique creation, and he changed his view of elves as he saw fit.In the end, Tolkien's view of elves collides with the view of many other fantasy authors. "Sweeping Tokien aside" doesn't mean much. He is one author among many. He has a very specific view of elves, which is bound to his setting (and a different one in his older work). He hardly uses any magic, which is also much different to a lot of other fantasy literature. In this sense, Tolkien represents a very small niche of fantasy literature; a very popular niche, but a niche, nevertheless.One other point: It is remarkable that none of the LotR RPGs, be it MERP or Decipher's LotR game, have been overly successful. The problem is that LotR as a book makes for a bad fantasy RPG without major changes. This means that the publisher's choice is more or less between a truthful, but boring adaptation of the books, or the introduction of major changes to make the game interesting (like MERP), which in turn upsets the fans.And this is the gist of the argument: D&D, from its very beginnings, did not take its basic concepts from LotR. It took some of the racial concepts and a bit of window dressing, but the main influences are from distinctly different fantasy sources. And those included electric elevators, flying cars and supercomputers.</blockquote>

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