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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Hussar" data-source="post: 7271695" data-attributes="member: 22779">On a side note, I'm certainly no Tolkien fan-boy.  I do not particularly care for LotR, I found it boring and, while I've tried to read it more than once, I find myself skipping entire pages.  It's pretty much everything I dislike about fantasy as a genre - over blown world building coupled with virtually no character development.  And exercise in mental masturbation and self-congratulatory back patting for creating such a wonderful world.  Bleah.  No thanks.  But, that being said, I don't think it's possible to understate just how much of an impact Tolkien has had on both the genre and D&D in particular.  He's the Shakespeare of Fantasy literature.  And, as such, even when you point to other writers, it's entirely possible that those writers - Leiber and others who were contemporary of Tolkien - were directly or indirectly influenced by Tolkien.  Sure, we can talk about pulps, but, D&D doesn't really resemble the pulps at all.  Conan, Tarzan, John Carter, all of these larger than life characters living in human dominated worlds.  I mean, take something as simple as non-human nation states like we see in Greyhawk.  I'm drawing a blank on any of the pulp writers having nation states of elves, dwarves and orcs.  Yet, funnily enough, I find those quite easily in Tolkien.Take Anderson's Three Hearts and Three Lions which is often mentioned as a direct influence on Tolkien.  Here's what Wikipedia has to say:So, how can we discount the impact that Tolkien has had?  Are there other sources?  Of course there are.  Sure.  Lots of the Monster Manual isn't drawn from Tolkien.  Fair enough.  But, ask yourself this, which is more iconic in D&D - orcs and goblins or Rakshasa and Yeti?</blockquote>

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