AbdulAlhazred
Legend
Trick is legends and myths arent normally a team game *(having a singular hero jump into the next tier is ok) and face it playing the incompetent thief hobbit alongside the paragon Aragorn works really crappy in every version of D&D if it were Fate and you can give the hobbit real luck bonuses and can make Meek and overlooked and sought after by Ring Lord even more powerful than the awesome of the Returning King it is different.
None of that is in dispute...
However, I would like to say that any use of LotR as a commentary on disparity of power between characters drastically misses the point of that piece of fiction. Aragorn, the supremely equipped and endowed by fate heir to the throne of Gondor (and by extension is descended from at least one demi-god depending on how you parse such things) has no more impact on the STORY than Samwise Gamgee, an itinerant gardener and 'Man Friday' halfling with no pedigree or experience at all. The other characters, regardless of overt power, appear to manifest equal story impact. Every single one of the Fellowship plays a pivotal role in events (well, Gimli and Legolas perhaps less so than the others, and Boromir's part is somewhat inadvertent, though he does act as a catalyst.
My point is, really if you look at it, if you want a system that is more amenable to the various types of legends and myths you find, and even basic folklore, you would probably want to use a more distinctly story-oriented system where things like 'great fighting prowess' are just attributes on a par with other ones like 'incredible loyalty and determination' etc. Some sort of, perhaps FATE-like system would handle LotR for example. In such a game the choices of the players would be about applying their character's attributes to the various situations to see what happens, and not so much in a morass of technical details which basically say "no, your weak halfling cannot defeat a giant spider demon in battle, even with a magic sword."
I would say a lot of the canon of German Folklore and legend would quite happily fit within the same sort of paradigm.
With D&D (and 4e maybe even in particular) you cannot expect that. The game is very prevalent, and it says you have to work your way up to 25th level before you really have any chance at all to gank Demogorgon. It also mandates, logically, that all the PCs go through basically the same development process and they are granted basically the same mechanical heft in terms of combat ability, etc. AD&D is a good bit looser there, but it isn't REALLY trying to be radically different in that respect. It was just designed to allow more for 'troupe play' and envisages situations where some PCs will be 'primary' and others might be more 'hangers-on' at that point in time. This does sometimes let it emulate literature/legend a bit better, but not always, and the game aspect does suffer at times, depending on how you WANT the game to work.