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?

 

[CF07]

And of course the LotR was only published in 1954-55, and the fantasy field far more sparse in the OP's youth. Furthermore, what "fantasy" means today is quite different than what it meant when D&D came out in 1974.

I agree with your take. Also, while published in the '50s, at least in the USA where TTRPGs were primarily invented, LotR didn't really take off until the '60s around the same time as other things that started the broader genre started, e.g., renfaires. The classic Appendix N fantasy that Gygax listed as influences was pretty niche.

 

[CF07]

A group of mercenaries set out to steal the treasure from under the nose of a monster.

I put it to you that The Hobbit is swords and sorcery.

Yes, it's definitely got aspects of that. LotR also has a lot of horror aspects, primarily brought in via Tolkien's World War I experiences. And Middle Earth is in a lot of ways a post-apocalyptic world.

 

[Bri]

I saw Star Wars in drive in when I was 8 and it was EVERYTHING. We played lightsaber with broomsticks. First real novel I tried to read was Splinter in Mind's Eye, the first Star Wars novel.

Read Hobbit in 7th grade and it became EVERYTHING. Read everything Tolkien ever wrote and everything ever written about Tolkien.

D&D began about same time with boys from chess club. Miniature combat as a complex upgrade to chess.

Really hard to avoid influence of Tolkien. He used such broad source materials for his work. Note that orcs are out of Roman mythology and Greek epics are the greatest sources. Very little survived of northern European mythology. Even though primary characters are northern like Hobbits, others like Aragon obviously Greek.

Alignment? That's pure Tolkien. He was an extreme white hat/black hat kinda guy. This is what children need. Oh boy is Strider scary until you figure out he's just in disguise as a bad guy

Ambiguous morality is forbidden. That's Southern Goth like Ann Rice where a vampire can be a hero and has nothing to do with Tolkien. There can be neutrality like the Ents or Tom Bombadil maybe, but never ambiguity. Twisted souls in need of saving like Gollum or Darth Vader

 

[CF07]

I saw Star Wars in drive in when I was 8 and it was EVERYTHING. We played lightsaber with broomsticks.

We used taped together Hot Wheels tracks! Those stung but broomsticks must have really hurt.

Really hard to avoid influence of Tolkien. He used such broad source materials for his work. Note that orcs are out of Roman mythology and Greek epics are the greatest sources. Very little survived of northern European mythology. Even though primary characters are northern like Hobbits, others like Aragon obviously Greek.

I agree about the broad sources but I think you miss some important points that are not Roman or Greek: Aragorn is very much a "true king" archetype very common to Medieval stories such as the Matter of France and Matter of England and earlier back to the Bible (and likely earlier). Furthermore Tolkien, along with a number of other writers in his rough time or a generation after, e.g., Michael Moorcock, were strongly influenced by the Finnish national mythology, the Kalevala, which was reconstructed in the 19th Century by a folklorist from traditional stories. Turin Turambar, one of the key characters in The Silmarillion, is pretty much a direct lift of Kullervo, for example. Tolkien, who was a professor at Oxford, was known as a key scholar of Beowulf and I'm sure he was familiar with both the Prose Edda and Poetic Edda. He'd been trained in Classics and English Literature, focusing on Old English and Medieval English.

Alignment? That's pure Tolkien.

Not at all. It, like a lot of D&Disms, came from Poul Anderson's Three Hearts and Three Lions (and Michael Moorcock's Eternal Champion stories). The "good vs. evil" axis was added several years after the "law vs. chaos" axis and didn't even appear in the parallel D&D line (as opposed to AD&D) that became BECMI at all. Daddy Rolled a 1 has a nice video on it.

Ambiguous morality is forbidden. That's Southern Goth like Ann Rice where a vampire can be a hero and has nothing to do with Tolkien. There can be neutrality like the Ents or Tom Bombadil maybe, but never ambiguity. Twisted souls in need of saving like Gollum or Darth Vader

There's plenty of ambiguous morality in The Silmarillion and The Hobbit. Even in LotR, Galadriel starts out quite ambiguously if you know her backplot. Although she is redeemed by refusing the Ring when Frodo offers it to her, it takes literally thousands of years to get to that place. The dwarves are pretty equivocal about their opposition to Sauron until he attacks them.

Regardless, D&D is broad enough that people play all sorts of ways, not just a "good vs. evil" type campaign. The earliest games were much more smash and grab dungeon delving than good vs. evil.

 

[Bri]

There's plenty of ambiguous morality in The Silmarillion and The Hobbit. Even in LotR, Galadriel starts out quite ambiguously if you know her backplot. Although she is redeemed by refusing the Ring when Frodo offers it to her, it takes literally thousands of years to get to that place. The dwarves are pretty equivocal about their opposition to Sauron until he attacks them.

Going to have to totally disagree. Huge difference between a story of redemption compared to a morally ambiguous, irredeemable, and lovable character like Vampire LeState. This is a new art form. Probably invented by Gone with the Wind, with the absolutely irredeemable Scarlet and Rhett. Worst people in the world and the entire country fell in love with them.

Every modern story like that from Blade to Bert Reynolds in Smokey and the Bandit can be traced back to GWTW.

But not Tolkien. His hero, Frodo is Christ like in his willingness to sacrifice himself for the good of the world. Even Gollum could have redeemed himself. Frodo tried to save him, but like Christ he can't save you unless you want to save yourself. Even Sauron himself would have been forgiven if only he returned to Manwe and begged for mercy.

Now Conan...lol. That's morally ambiguous. Han Solo is morally ambiguous. Like Rhett Butler, sure he's a hero and saves the day. He also only does it for himself.

Dwarves probably the most morally ambiguous thing in Tolkien

 

[piper909]

If you are of a certain age, you grew up with only books (or comics), pre-dating any of the D&D games or any of the movies -- hence, people like me and my friends, in middle school/early high school, reading fantasy and sci-fi, discovering wargames (Avalon Hill, SPI), and Lord of the Rings pretty much simultaneously. I am happy that my first two complete readings of LOTR (and then catching up to the Hobbit) were done while Professor Tolkien was still alive! When I was introduced to (original) D&D in summer 1977 it felt fairly familiar -- very Tolkienesque (it still included hobbits and ents) and very Conan-esque. I came to read D&D influences like Vance, Leiber, Anderson, Moorcock, etc. later, in college, while already playing and DMing D&D. And I was very well-versed in Greek mythology from childhood. I'm not sure the classical myths are even part of public school classrooms anymore, but I loved all that stuff as a kid (and still do!).

I kinda feel sorry for the folks who only know of Tolkien's writings from movie adaptations or knock-off fan-fiction like "Rings of Power." I think they've missed out on a lot, and probably have formed some very different impressions of what Tolkien was all about or intended. Kind of like I feel sorry for gamers who are used to being spoon-fed their adventures and game settings from publishers. Admirable as those often are, they mean substituting someone else's vision and imagination for your own. In the beginning, RPGs were, for the Dungeon Master, more about crafting YOUR own world for your players to share. It was a lot more work, of course; and I suppose a number of DMs weren't really up to the task. So it's good that there areprofessional, prefab modules and worlds to explore as well.

PS: The Silmarillion (and its spinoffs like The Children of Hurin, Beren and Luthien, The Fall of Gondolin) never gets its due! I adore this posthumous work and feel it's due for an expanded, corrected (?), re-edited deluxe edition (including the Ted Naismith illustrations).

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Going to have to totally disagree. Huge difference between a story of redemption compared to a morally ambiguous, irredeemable, and lovable character like Vampire LeState. This is a new art form. Probably invented by Gone with the Wind, with the absolutely irredeemable Scarlet and Rhett. Worst people in the world and the entire country fell in love with them.

Every modern story like that from Blade to Bert Reynolds in Smokey and the Bandit can be traced back to GWTW.

But not Tolkien. His hero, Frodo is Christ like in his willingness to sacrifice himself for the good of the world. Even Gollum could have redeemed himself. Frodo tried to save him, but like Christ he can't save you unless you want to save yourself. Even Sauron himself would have been forgiven if only he returned to Manwe and begged for mercy.

Now Conan...lol. That's morally ambiguous. Han Solo is morally ambiguous. Like Rhett Butler, sure he's a hero and saves the day. He also only does it for himself.

Dwarves probably the most morally ambiguous thing in Tolkien

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?

 

[Bri]

PS: The Silmarillion (and its spinoffs like The Children of Hurin, Beren and Luthien, The Fall of Gondolin) never gets its due! I adore this posthumous work and feel it's due for an expanded, corrected (?), re-edited deluxe edition (including the Ted Naismith illustrations).

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

 

[Aldarc]

Alignment? That's pure Tolkien.

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

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.

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.

and I'm sure he was familiar with both the Prose Edda and Poetic Edda.

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

 

[piper909]

Going to have to totally disagree. Huge difference between a story of redemption compared to a morally ambiguous, irredeemable, and lovable character like Vampire LeState. This is a new art form. Probably invented by Gone with the Wind, with the absolutely irredeemable Scarlet and Rhett. Worst people in the world and the entire country fell in love with them.

Whoa, that's harsh. To this day, I know many, many women of various ages for whom Scarlett O'Hara is a heroine (flawed, but heroic) whose character does evolve over the course of the novel (maybe more so than the film version). I don't see how she merits being placed among the "worst people in the world". Let's put this down to hyperbole.