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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Turjan" data-source="post: 2454245" data-attributes="member: 3477">I think you're fighting against windmills here. It is very clear to me that D&D has many influences besides Tolkien. As you can take from my handle, I'm a big Jack Vance fan myself, and I was reading the 'Dying Earth' before I ever saw a Tolkien book. I'm aware that it's older than the LotR and that the magic system and some spells are yoinked from those stories. And, and this is important, I'm aware of the fact that the world of the 'Dying Earth' has no resemblance to Tolkien's fantasy tropes. It's important to note that most people don't know the book at all, and this is true for many books in your list. This means, in the context of this thread, that ideas from those books have no instant recognition value that facilitates the accessibility of the game. Compared to them, Tolkien's fantasy tropes are widespread and well-known by many people. And although you are right that Tolkien plundered mythology and older sources for his works, you underestimate the many subtle changes he performed in the general view of these mythological tropes. You're right that hobbits are indisputably his (except the concept of 'little people' living in houses); but I dare to claim that our typical fantasy dwarves and elves are, too. Even if D&D elves are not immortal, they are definitely based on the LotR. If you want mythological elves and dwarves, look at the 'Hobbit', where they are still much closer to common concepts (dangerous, dancing in the forests at night, living in palaces under hills), though the shift already began. The concept of the mixed-"race" 'fellowship' seems also to come from there.These are the concepts people began to expect from 'fantasy'. And that's why I think it's a mistake to underestimate this influence on D&D's recognition value, and why I cannot take the author's claim at face value <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />.</blockquote>

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