Worlds of Design: In the Shadow of Tolkien

The answer is likely predicated on if you came to Tolkien before you came to FRPGs.

Picture courtesy of Pixabay.​

"Nobody believes me when I say that my long book is an attempt to create a world in which a form of language agreeable to my personal aesthetic might seem real. But it is true." - J. R. R. Tolkien

I read the Lord of the Rings (LOTR) when I was in my late teens, about seven years before original Dungeons & Dragons was released. (The Hobbit came later for me.) This is long before any LOTR movies, of course. Most of you have read LOTR (or watched the Peter Jackson movies) long after the release of D&D, I suspect, but still we can ask which came first for you, LOTR or D&D?

Which Came First (for You)?​

I’d suppose that Tolkien is likely to have a greater influence on your gaming if you came to Tolkien before you came to fantasy role-playing games (FRPGs).

This also might depend on when you started playing FRPGs. When I first played D&D (1975) the assumption was that the GM would mine fantasy novels and stories, and myths and legends, for ideas for his/her campaign. I remember hunting down Stith-Thompson’s Motif Index of Folklore Literature (in Duke Library), surely not something many GMs do today (even though today it’s a free PDF rather than huge paper volumes). There were few adventure modules and even fewer ready-made settings to buy. With this approach, Tolkien would be one author amongst many, maybe foremost but still just one.

Gary Gygax listed in Appendix N of AD&D the novels/novelists that had influenced him, including many long preceding LOTR. I’ve read most of the books listed in the Appendix, but I suspect many younger people have read few of them. Working from the list, Jeffro Johnson in his book Appendix N: the Literary History of Dungeons & Dragons, by reviewing these books, has ably demonstrated that there were a lot stronger influences on D&D than Tolkien.

Tolkien’s Expanding Influence​

Even before the Ralph Bakshi LOTR movie (1978) I gauged the likelihood that someone would like D&D according to whether or not they’d read The Lord of the Rings. (Many give up because the book starts slowly.) If they had not read it, prospects were much less rosy. Now, with many movies (Peter Jackson’s, Bakshi’s, and the Rankin Bass follow-up to Bakshi, and others more obscure), and even a LOTR TV series (Rings of Power), I don’t rely on my old view. On the other hand, so many more people are aware of LOTR (and of RPGs) than in the pre-movie past.

More recently, adventure modules and even settings of all kinds can be found online, including many that are free. GMs don’t have to make up adventures or settings, they can use someone else’s creations. Further, many of the old fantasy authors are virtually unknown to recent generations. But with the movies, Tolkien is even more well-known than when there were only books. Do the movies make Tolkien a stronger influence? Or do GMs today just accept whatever adventures/settings they acquire and not change much? For most these days, likely the latter.

Beyond Tolkien​

If you want more discussion of Tolkien’s influence, see my previous articles (Escaping Tolkien and Reassessing Tolkien’s Influence). As I wrote this, I asked myself, what’s the biggest influence likely to be, after Tolkien?

Conan the Barbarian (whether the savage Robert E. Howard version, or the more tempered ones by other authors that followed)? Wheel of Time? Game of Thrones? Dresden Files? David Eddings’ Mallorean and Belgariad? Brandon Sanderson’s Mistborn? Harry Potter? Superhero movies? Something from Appendix N days such as Poul Anderson’s Three Hearts and Three Lions?

Your Turn: Do you think the timing on your exposure to Tolkien’s works influenced your FRPG play?

 

[piper909]

No!!!!!

Christopher was so good with the estate. Responsible for all the posthumous publishing. He wrote about how he edited, mostly making very hard decisions on which of the many versions to publish.

He hated the movie so much for twisting the story, that he never allowed another. The grandson, currently running the estate doesn't care and will sell out to highest bidder. He is responsible for everything awful about these modern tv shows.

Nothing needs to change. Can only be changed for the worse. If someone was so talented, they could improve it, why would such a person waste their talent doing a remake? Everything Star Wars is garbage since Lucas out. It simply can't be improved for exactly the same reason the Mona Lisa can't. It's art. If you think you can improve it, you aren't an artist

I politely disagree. The Silmarillion came out in 1977 and was rushed to completion and heavily abridged. We can see that from the later, full-length narratives that have been published since. Also, as "The History of Middle-Earth" series was edited and published, over succeeding decades, many new or revised manuscripts came to light and much of this would only make The Silmarillion more expansive. Just two examples: we NOW have the Oath of Feanor. It doesn't have to just be alluded to. Why not put this back where it belongs? And the Dagor Dagorath, the Last Battle, ought to be the concluding epilogue, as once intended.

That said, I do despair at how lesser talents are mucking about with the legendarium (Rings of Power, ugh) and so I suppose it's quite possible someone will try to spoil The Silmarillion in some way, some day.

 

[Bri]

That's Poul Anderson as popularized (and cited) by Michael Moorcock's Eternal Champions series.

Never read it (or don't remember) If he invented the 9 alignments ok, but I would give libertarians credit for their 2d political scale

Tolkien I said was black hat/white hat, with some I'm not on anyone's side because no one is on my side of the Ents and the complete drop out of elves in hiding or Tom.

Dwarves are the exception and Tolkien wrote about why that is.

I read a fun scholarly essay that talked about how Frodo exists as the doomed Pagan hero whereas Aragorn exists as the ordained Christian hero

No. Tolkien wrote about that and his motive

The names of Gandalf and the other dwarves in The Hobbit came out of the Poetic Edda.

There's no story behind them tho. Namegd in Edda. Story comes from Niebalungenligegg.

Note in German mythology dwarf are Jews and Tolkien wrote explaining it. The movie infuriated Christopher for turning them into Scottish which twists everything

 

[Aldarc]

Never read it (or don't remember) If he invented the 9 alignments ok, but I would give libertarians credit for their 2d political scale

Tolkien I said was black hat/white hat, with some I'm not on anyone's side because no one is on my side of the Ents and the complete drop out of elves in hiding or Tom.

You said the Alignment was pure Tolkien. Myself and others noted that you were wrong about that. As previously said, Alignment in D&D first appeared as Law vs. Chaos, which came from Anderson and Moorcock. Both were strong literary sources for Gygax. Good vs. Evil doesn't come into the picture until later in D&D's history, when Gygax adds this axis to the pre-existing alignment system to create the Nine Alignment system that D&D is now famous for.

There's no story behind them tho. Namegd in Edda. Story comes from Niebalungenligegg.

It's remarkable how you write errors with such confidence. But maybe it's a language issue. Is English your first language? Even if it wasn't though, it doesn't take much effort to look up how to spell Das Nibelungenlied (The Songs of the Nibelungs) if that's what you are trying to spell.

That said, the point is that Tolkien was familiar with the Poetic and Prose Edda, which is where the names of various characters in The Hobbit comes from.

Note in German mythology dwarf are Jews and Tolkien wrote explaining it. The movie infuriated Christopher for turning them into Scottish which twists everything

I'm not touching this landmine even with a 100 ft. pole.

 

[Micah Sweet]

The answer is likely predicated on if you came to Tolkien before you came to FRPGs.

View attachment 408864
Picture courtesy of Pixabay.​

I read the Lord of the Rings (LOTR) when I was in my late teens, about seven years before original Dungeons & Dragons was released. (The Hobbit came later for me.) This is long before any LOTR movies, of course. Most of you have read LOTR (or watched the Peter Jackson movies) long after the release of D&D, I suspect, but still we can ask which came first for you, LOTR or D&D?

Which Came First (for You)?​

I’d suppose that Tolkien is likely to have a greater influence on your gaming if you came to Tolkien before you came to fantasy role-playing games (FRPGs).

This also might depend on when you started playing FRPGs. When I first played D&D (1975) the assumption was that the GM would mine fantasy novels and stories, and myths and legends, for ideas for his/her campaign. I remember hunting down Stith-Thompson’s Motif Index of Folklore Literature (in Duke Library), surely not something many GMs do today (even though today it’s a free PDF rather than huge paper volumes). There were few adventure modules and even fewer ready-made settings to buy. With this approach, Tolkien would be one author amongst many, maybe foremost but still just one.

Gary Gygax listed in Appendix N of AD&D the novels/novelists that had influenced him, including many long preceding LOTR. I’ve read most of the books listed in the Appendix, but I suspect many younger people have read few of them. Working from the list, Jeffro Johnson in his book Appendix N: the Literary History of Dungeons & Dragons, by reviewing these books, has ably demonstrated that there were a lot stronger influences on D&D than Tolkien.

Tolkien’s Expanding Influence​

Even before the Ralph Bakshi LOTR movie (1978) I gauged the likelihood that someone would like D&D according to whether or not they’d read The Lord of the Rings. (Many give up because the book starts slowly.) If they had not read it, prospects were much less rosy. Now, with many movies (Peter Jackson’s, Bakshi’s, and the Rankin Bass follow-up to Bakshi, and others more obscure), and even a LOTR TV series (Rings of Power), I don’t rely on my old view. On the other hand, so many more people are aware of LOTR (and of RPGs) than in the pre-movie past.

More recently, adventure modules and even settings of all kinds can be found online, including many that are free. GMs don’t have to make up adventures or settings, they can use someone else’s creations. Further, many of the old fantasy authors are virtually unknown to recent generations. But with the movies, Tolkien is even more well-known than when there were only books. Do the movies make Tolkien a stronger influence? Or do GMs today just accept whatever adventures/settings they acquire and not change much? For most these days, likely the latter.

Beyond Tolkien​

If you want more discussion of Tolkien’s influence, see my previous articles (Escaping Tolkien and Reassessing Tolkien’s Influence). As I wrote this, I asked myself, what’s the biggest influence likely to be, after Tolkien?

Conan the Barbarian (whether the savage Robert E. Howard version, or the more tempered ones by other authors that followed)? Wheel of Time? Game of Thrones? Dresden Files? David Eddings’ Mallorean and Belgariad? Brandon Sanderson’s Mistborn? Harry Potter? Superhero movies? Something from Appendix N days such as Poul Anderson’s Three Hearts and Three Lions?

Your Turn: Do you think the timing on your exposure to Tolkien’s works influenced your FRPG play?

I first read the Hobbit in 1986, at almost exactly the same time I was introduced to D&D through the Metzer Basic Set. To me, I saw the options in the Red Box and translated them to Tolkien terms. One of the first RPGs I got interested in after D&D was a borrowed copy of MERP (interested enough to ask my dad to make a photocopy if it for me at his work). Tolkien's worldbuilding led directly to my deep love for worldbuilding in RPGs, and setting lore in general, so much so that I enjoying reading such material as much or more than playing games that feature it.

 

[Micah Sweet]

It's funny to me, because I came to D&D largely through Dragonlance originally, and I have realized that I tend to view other settings and storylines through that lens, even Lord of the Rings (which I read later, reread and enjoyed more, and certainly put more academic analysis into). It's the baseline through which I frame fantasy/Sword and Sorcery. The Orders of High Sorcery are my basal magic order; Soth pops to mind before the Witchking; Silvanesti/Qualenesti/Kagonesti are how I group my elves; the dwarves...ok, the dwarves are interchangeable. [That's a joke, folks.]

The real validity of a fantasy setting comes by how right or dirty they do by their minotaurs.

On the other hand, it's also pretty easy to read Dragonlance as Mormon LotR and LotR as English Catholic Dragonlance.

Dragonlance was the first fantasy I read after the Hobbit, before I finished LotR.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Sorry, but Tolkien was not that great of an influence on my tabletop gaming.

No need to apologize.

 

[Micah Sweet]

My influence before Dungeons and Dragons was definitely Conan the Barbarian (Robert Jordan, et al.) I still haven't finished the Lord of the Rings, and it's Treebeard's fault.

I don't like Tolkien's outsized influence on Dungeons and Dragons and, through D&D, upon the whole fantasy world.

Fair enough. I don't like Dungeons & Dragons's outsized influence on RPGs.

 

[Mercurius]

Er...doesn't...Frodo actually succumb to the temptation of the Ring?

Hard to call that "Christ-like" when he literally did choose to be the Dark Lord at the end (even though that 100% guaranteed would have meant the Ring betrayed him for someone more powerful), and the world was only saved because of Gollum's legitimately insane greed. That's what leaves Frodo a broken, hollow man afterward--he has to live the rest of his life with knowing that he, unlike any of the other paragons in his life, both little folk like Sam and Merry, and great and powerful people like Aragorn, Gandalf, and Galadriel.

You want someone Christ-like, you have to look to Aragorn. That's part of why it's so terrifically important that Aragorn isn't the main character of LotR. He is the Big Good, the All-Loving Hero, the True Prophesied King, Incorruptible Pure Pureness, etc., etc.

Tolkien's moral complexity is not in "lots of people do horrible horrible things and just sort of vibe with it", but then again, I've never seen that as being particularly morally complex. His moral complexity comes in how good people legitimately struggle against temptation, and several times only barely pass--or, occasionally, don't pass at all. Denethor's corruption through the Palantir, for example, or the physical and mental poisoning of Theoden.

"Selfish person does a heroic thing" is far from the only form of complexity. For goodness' sake, the DCAU Superman is a morally-complex character, and he's straight-up 100% unquestionably a paragon among paragons who only ever did intentional wrong when he was mind-controlled by Darkseid into thinking that his actions were just and righteous. But he still manages to be morally complex because a person who is absolutely convinced that what they're doing is the right thing to do but they're wrong is a huge bundle of, as my generation likes to put it, "Ho don't do it."

Also...redemption is now not morally complex? Really?

Nice post. I did want to comment on your take of Frodo. I think part of Tolkien's point is that literally no one could have truly resisted the One Ring, which is why Gandalf and Galadriel refused it - they knew they'd eventually be corrupted, or at least be "benevolent fascists." Frodo did about as good as anyone could possibly expect to do.

Now maybe Aragorn would have been more successful - hard to say. But he probably would have followed a similar path to Galadriel's and Gandalf's speculation, and tried to do good with it. Sam might have also been successful, I suppose, because he was a true follower - in service to Frodo.

While Tolkien didn't like allegory, I think he was expressing a view on absolute power, and specifically power over others. It just can't be done in a way that won't eventually be corrupted. Tom Bombadil is probably the lone exception in all of Middle-earth, because he was literally without any contrivance or underlying motive to alter the natural order.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

I read a fun scholarly essay that talked about how Frodo exists as the doomed Pagan hero whereas Aragorn exists as the ordained Christian hero. I can't unsee it, and I see flavors of that essay in what you wrote. Can't remember where that article was, but it was good reading.

While I think it is possible to read it this way, I would personally disagree.

Sauron is incredibly confident when he thinks Aragorn is riding out to meet him bearing the Ring. He genuinely can't conceive of a leader who would refuse to use its power. That's what makes Aragorn what he is; someone who trusts Providence enough to forgo such things. Like Gandalf and Galadriel, he refuses the temptation, though for him it is clearly easier (and that ease is one part that contributes to him being a Christianized hero.) Frodo isn't really any kind of hero at all, at least not in my view. He's genuinely an ordinary (if well-to-do) person ground down by the wheel, and rescued by the actions of others--someone, in a sense, always controlled by others, never truly in control of his own destiny. Absolute power and the temptation of evil broke him, and he never truly recovers, but he does still find forgiveness and succor.

But, again, I think this is a reasonable reading that can point to some parts of the text to back it up. I just think that the greater weight is on Frodo as "not actually a hero at all, and thus broken by a world that demands he be something he isn't." Which isn't exactly a surprising sentiment coming from a man who fought in WWI and took courses to train for the cipher bureau in WWII (and who had sons that served in WWII).

Nice post. I did want to comment on your take of Frodo. I think part of Tolkien's point is that literally no one could have truly resisted the One Ring, which is why Gandalf and Galadriel refused it - they knew they'd eventually be corrupted, or at least be "benevolent fascists." Frodo did about as good as anyone could possibly expect to do.

Now maybe Aragorn would have been more successful - hard to say. But he probably would have followed a similar path to Galadriel's and Gandalf's speculation, and tried to do good with it. Sam might have also been successful, I suppose, because he was a true follower - in service to Frodo.

Fully agreed. The problem with the Ring is that, even with a maia-vs-maia battle, direct confrontation would be too dangerous. All of them knew they would need to weaken the enemy by developing their own power base first, and that very thing is what would doom them. As Gandalf said, "Do not tempt me! For I do not wish to become like the Dark Lord himself. Yet the way of the Ring to my heart is by pity, pity for weakness and the desire of strength to do good. Do not tempt me! I dare not take it, not even to keep it safe, unused. The wish to wield it would be too great for my strength. I shall have such need of it. Great perils lie before me.”

Even Aragorn would have succumbed with time, even with all his advantages--and Sauron was probably right to assume that a mere man, Numenorean or not, could not stand toe to toe with him, a maia, fallen or otherwise. The Ring would all too likely betray him as it had Isildur. Aragorn's strength lies in his refusal to use it. That's what makes him among the purest good characters. He cognitively understands what the Ring could do for him, but he never once betrays an interest in it--even if he felt it deep in his heart, he's strong enough to squelch it into utter silence.

While Tolkien didn't like allegory, I think he was expressing a view on absolute power, and specifically power over others. It just can't be done in a way that won't eventually be corrupted. Tom Bombadil is probably the lone exception in all of Middle-earth, because he was literally without any contrivance or underlying motive to alter the natural order.

Yeah, I don't think it's an allegory per se, or if it is, it's a pretty mild one. Instead, it's more speculative fiction. If this power existed, what would it do? And the answer is: corrupt anyone ambitious enough to claim it. This isn't a story that has a Cincinnatus archetype, the person who can take up absolute power for just one month and then cast it aside the instant it isn't needed anymore.

Completely agreed on Tom, yeah. As Gandalf notes, he's more than strong enough to protect the Ring...but he is almost totally inhuman in his utter lack of interest. The Ring can't touch him, but in a certain sense, he can't touch the Ring either. It's a non-entity to him, which makes him incapable of being its guardian. I don't think he's foolish enough to fail to understand why others care, but he just...doesn't.

 

[Aldarc]

Frodo isn't really any kind of hero at all, at least not in my view.

Keep in mind that I said that Frodo shares parallels with Pagan heroes, not EzekielRaiden heroes. For example, Achilles is not much of a "hero" by modern standards, but he very much was one by ancient pre-Christian standards.

Either way, I'm uninterested in getting dragged in an argument with you after sharing an interesting tidbit that I thought you would find interesting and that seemingly supported your argument. But if your nature is to stir disagreement with people who otherwise agree with you, then you likely won't make too many friends.