D&D 5E Why D&D is not (just) Tolkien

[lowkey13]

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[Parmandur]

There are references in Appendix N, that at the time D&D was created, were more popular than Tolkien's work. You're looking at it through a post Jackson movie trilogy popularity lens. So to say that D&D leapfrogged off of Tolkien but not off of more popular references at the time (like C.S. Lewis or Lewis Carrol) , seems really odd. Again, I'm not saying Tolkien wasn't widely popular. He was. But you're doing an incredible disservice to all the other references, which were hugely popular in the 60s and 70s, even moreso than Tolkien based the fact that we saw new S&S fantasy crop up all the time, and hardly any high fantasy.

The bottom line is that we didn't start to see people emulating Tolkien's style of high fantasy until the late 70s--years after D&D was created. We're not talking about people directly using his material, we didn't even see people emulate that style until the late 70s. The Hobbit movie and Sword of Shannara are probably the two most popular emulations of Tolkien of the time. Terry Brooks wasn't sued, to my knowledge, so there was nothing stopping people from emulating the same style. It was popular culture to favor S&S in the 60s and 70s over Tolkien's style. This is not opinion. We can measure it by looking at what was actually created.

Sword of Shannara was written in the 60's, near ten years before it was published: the publishing industry thought the massive (and it was massive) popularity of Tolkien was an odd fluke, until Del Rey proved otherwise in a gamble. People were writing the stories way before the late 70's, they just weren't hitting market until then.

In fact, dig this theory: the success of D&D made the market for further Tolkienian fantasy by proving the existence of a market although the influences are hardly overwhelming, they are many of them in very obvious parts of the game like PC creation (I can be Legolas!).

Tolkien's Elves had beards, incidentally: Círdan the Shipwright grew his out, notably.

 

[Celebrim]

Jack of Shadows. Specifically called out for reading (the infamous Appendix N).

Well, I've read Jack of Shadows, and the example is not convincing.

Jack is a god, and among other skills is a computer programmer. The D&D thief is not evocative of Jack at all.

Hide in Shadows.
Climb sheer surfaces.
Uses magic.

Those examples are vastly too vague and generic to be convincing. Climbing and hiding are normal activities for any sort of literary thief, and have plenty of real world analogs ('top story man', 'cat burglar'). Jack is a full fledged spell caster and spell crafter, where as the D&D thief has only limited ability to 'steal' the magic from others.

 

[Shadowdweller00]

Well, 4.6 biblions would simply be absurd.

Naturally.

 

[lowkey13]

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[Harzel]

I said he was popular. But he wasn't more popular than Howard.

By what measure? Howard's work certainly had a longer and more varied history, but in terms of broad impact on popular culture as of, say, 1970, I kind of think I would have to go with Tolkien. However, overall popularity is certainly not the same as influence on D&D via Gygax.

Certainly not the end all, be all of fantasy that was the sole reason a game like D&D could be created.

Agreed. I didn't make any "sole reason" claim. I just said your timeline for Tolkien was a bit off.

There's a reason why a bunch of fantasy movies were being made in the 60s and 70s long before they took a risk on an animated Tolkien one.

Unless you explicate the reason and what you think it implies, all that I can see that this proves is the Tolkien did not invent fantasy. But I don't think anyone was questioning that. Also, there wasn't a Conan movie until 1982. So what?

Popular, yes. Of course. But people are overestimating his influence of the time.

Depends on which estimate you are talking about, I guess.

 

[Celebrim]

Personally, I'm having trouble thinking of a lot of other sources of magical rings. The one variation on the djinni legend, the lamp your rub /with the matching ring/, and the titular ring of the Nibelung (of which the One Ring can surely be considered derivative, in story arc, if not in powers). What am I blanking on?

I'm not sure. Plato seems to have invented the idea of the Ring of Invisibility when embellishing the tale of Gyges, In the original Aladdin tale from the 1001 Tales, after he has the lamp stolen from him, he acquires a magic ring that lets him command a djinn (definitely D&D's 'Ring of djinni summoning') which he uses to get the lamp back. The Arab alchemists/wizards came to believe that Solomon's ring was magical and had the power to command demons, and this was the source of the numerous magic rings in the Arabian Nights tales. Perceval wears are magic ring that makes him invincible in battle (ring of protection?). And so forth.

The original thief couldn't use a magic wand via trickery, and Thieves' Cant is an older idea than Zelazny... IIRC, Lieber's Grey Mouser shared the D&D Thief's preferences for armor & weapons, including favoring the sling over the bow, and dabbled in both linguistics and magic. But, the Thief, like the warrior, is a hoary archetype, indeed.

Now that the question has been asked, I want to know the answer.

 

[Sacrosanct]

Sword of Shannara was written in the 60's, near ten years before it was published: the publishing industry thought the massive (and it was massive) popularity of Tolkien was an odd fluke, until Del Rey proved otherwise in a gamble. People were writing the stories way before the late 70's, they just weren't hitting market until then.
.

He started writing that book in the late 60s as a hobby writer. He was going to law school at the time and that was his focus as a career (that's what he told me anyway last time I spoke to him about 5ish years ago). The book wasn't actually published until 1977--a few years after he finished it. Which wouldn't have happened if Tolkienesque writing was as popular as people are saying (I imagine it would have been sooner if Tolkien was a big as people are saying so they could capitalize on the popularity). So you can't really use that books as an example of how popular Tolkien was in the 60s since it was a hobby write at first, and then wasn't published until '77.

Again, looking at the sort of stuff that was appearing in fanzines and what was being published prior to the late 70s was almost exclusively S&S and not Tolkienesque high fantasy. That is what was more popular at the time. It wasn't until the late 70s (years AFTER D&D) that we saw an explosion in high fantasy, from the Hobbit movie to Sword of Shannara.

Therefore, to the entire point of all this, everything points to D&D being D&D even if Tolkien never existed. The timeline does not lie. The material created during those years don't lie. Even Gary himself addressed this issue the year D&D was released.

 

[Sacrosanct]

By what measure? .

By looking at the material (books, fanzines, movies) that was being produced at the time. I've said this several times. S&S and mythology was being pushed out almost exclusively. I can't think any any examples of people publishing stuff that was emulating Tolkien until the late 70s. Then it exploded. High Fantasy came like a train in 1977/78

 

[lowkey13]

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