Gygax can claim what he wants, but the whole idea of elves/dwarves/halflings being actual people instead of mystical mysterious demi-god types comes from Tolkien.
No, you can find examples of elves and dwarves as folks like us in a lot of European folklore. They may be different, but "Markeson, you were right! People are the same, everywhere!"
Warlord, some points:
1) Use proper punctuation. It will make your posts easier to read and definitely seem less "trollish." Then, perhaps, you will get a little respect and fewer insults.
2) Tolkien made no movies. Movies were made from his work by Bass, Rankin, and Jackson, all after his death in 1973.
3) The Star Wars series contains as many lifts and borrowed elements as any other piece of fiction. The original movie
Star Wars, while good, was based on an old B&W samurai film (I'm a little rusty, but it may have been
Seven Samurai).
Phantom Menace, which truly sucked, was full of elements you could have picked up from watching the Discovery channel for a month in 2002-2003 (before they changed to their current format of people building hotrods & motorcycles-not that there's anything wrong with that). Think I'm kidding? Check out
Star Wars Origins (BTW: the site also does a great job revealing the influences on Tolkien's LOTR-including where
he got ents and hobbits from, as well as other great sci-fi/fantasy works.)
Furthermore, the Star Wars movies are most accurately described as "Space Opera," a subset of Sci-Fi, not Fantasy.
4) You can't blame Tolkien for the way people have flocked to his work. It was groundbreaking. That people really love his stuff is understandible. But you can't say that he made people narrowminded just because he raised the bar a little. Narowminded they may be, but they brought that to the table themselves.
