Yates 1

Nathaniel Yates
UWRT 1103
Professor Ingram
6 November 2015
Tolkiens Influences on Todays Best
If one were to ask any given person What is your favorite book? or
What is your favorite movie?, you would likely hear Rowlings Harry Potter
or maybe Star Wars. And to many people, these answers would be pretty
accurate since they have been rated best movie or book of the year many
times. Although these works may seem like pure literary genius to the naked
eye, not even the best authors go without influence from someone. Like
many other science fiction and fantasy novels, Harry Potter was very
influenced by Tolkiens Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit in aspects of plot,
characters, setting, and descriptive detail.
Recently a popular British magazine surveyed its readers, asking them
to vote for what they thought to be the greatest book of all time. After
multiple surveys, every one had a landslide winner of The Lord of the Rings.
Other than the bible, Tolkiens Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit, and The
Silmarillion are possibly the most influential novels ever written. Along with
Harry Potter and Star Wars, these novels have influenced nearly every
fantasy novel post 1950s, hard rock, and thousands of people during the
hippie movement in the 1960s and 1970s.

Yates 2

Tolkien shined a light on the fantasy genre, which before was not
nearly as popular or written with much detail before his novels. Tolkien
turned fantasy writing into an art, adding extremely detailed and specific
settings and events, new languages that he wrote for the different creatures
he included, maps of all the lands, and complete histories going back
hundreds of years of everything he wrote about to avoid just having things
thrust upon a reader without any prior knowledge.
Generally when one thinks of a good fantasy novel, it includes
adventure, a good hero fighting against the terrible forces of evil, mystical
beings, and conflict. Given these criteria, Tolkien leaves absolutely nothing
off. The Silmarillion involves a creation story, gods and goddesses, angels
and demons, and trying to bring down evil. The Hobbit is about a young
powerless hobbit who leaves his normal way of life to assist a band of
bearded dwarves and a wizard on a quest to fight evil and get there home,
and the Lord of the Rings is about another weak hobbit who has greatness
and peril destined to him by choices not his own and must go on a great
quest with dwarves, men, elves, wizards, and orcs with the ultimate goal of
defeating great evil with almost no chance for success.
Those basic aspects are what make up nearly all fantasy novels and
movies in some way or another. That being said, Tolkiens great success
made it very difficult for any new aspiring fantasy novelist to write anything
that is truly new and there own. Even Star Wars and Harry Potter follow
nearly this exact same outline, the only difference is the story in which the

Yates 3

themes were applied to. Both stories have a unique background with
different villains and heros but all with the same plot.
The plot of a novel is what keeps a reader reading. If you are reading a
story and you are bored out of your mind, you are very unlikely to read five
hundred pages of it. A lot of people who are avid readers of fantasy novels
read to escape reality. They read to get a break from their stressful lives and
for a short time live in an imaginary life of endless possibilities. This is what
makes fantasy novels so loved. Fantasy novel are just what they are called,
fantasy. They are not limited by reality or science, but instead limitless. The
only thing that determines how far it can go is your mind.
This reason is exactly why the Harry Potter series is so popular among
readers. There is not a person out there who has never dreamt of having
magical power to do whatever they want. These novels give reader the
chance to explore these dreams. I have friends today who say they often
dream about flying around on broomsticks over Hogwarts. That is the effect
fantasy has on people who read it. this sort of thing would never be quite as
effective to drawing in readers minds without extreme detail careful use of
words that authors such as Rowling learn to incorporate into their writing.
This sort of writing was never used in fantasy novels before the 1940s and
1950s when Tolkien was writing his novels.
Pre-Tolkien fantasy never had detail describing how things happened or
where they happened or anything that suggests that these things could be
fantasy. Older fantasy was very undetailed in setting and events and was

Yates 4

often time know to have said things like long ago and far away to describe
the setting. New fantasy is completely opposite in that the setting and detail
is probably the most important thing and authors spend pages and pages
describing what the characters see in one scene that may last about thirty
seconds in a movie. Between Tolkiens The Lord of the Rings trilogy and The
Hobbit, there was probably between two-hundred and three-hundred pages
devoted solely to description of setting and four-hundred more that add great
detail to the events that happen. These novel changed the future of fantasy
because other writers saw this and started adding more detail to their
stories, eventually gaining major popularity of their readers.
Another big difference between pre and post Tolkien literature is where
they take place. Most older fantastic literature takes place far away and
long ago. Newer, more modern fantasy takes place anywhere but Earth or
places of non earth properties. Whether they take place at the magical
world of Hogwarts or on one of the many distant planets in Star Wars,
authors are creating new exciting places for their stories to take place.
Tolkiens novels are what really started this creation of worlds.
Tolkiens Middle Earth was a huge complex world that was too much for the
regular mind with space for seven items to be stored in short term memory.
So to prevent the human mind from forgetting where every single thing is
compared to everything else, Tolkien drew maps of Middle Earth. Like
change of setting, character type is another thing that Tolkien brought into
fantasy writing.

Yates 5

Many characters seen in Harry Potter have a very similar copy in The
Lord of the Rings that not only plays the same role, but also is physically
very similar. Some of these characters include Albus Dumbledore, who is a
wise wizard who guides the protagonists in their quests like Gandalf the grey;
Harry Potter, the young and seemingly small protagonist who is born
destined to fight the powers of evil, just like Frodo Baggins; Ron Weasley, the
awkward best friend who sticks by the protagonist until the end, like
Samwise Gamgee; the Death Eaters, who are cloaked, evil servants of the
dark lord, like the Nazgul or Ringwraiths; Professor Snape, who looks much
like Wormtongue; Voldemort, who is known as the dark lord and was killed
long before but is trying to regain strength, like Sauron; Aragog, the giant
spider in the forbidden forest who in some way offers help to the
protagonists but eventually tries to kill them, like Shelob; and Ghosts, who in
Harry Potter are minimal characters but are able to offer some help, like the
ghosts in Lord of the Rings. Some other character related similarities include
the two protagonists inability to go near the dark lords without pain and the
dark lords ability to take a non-bodily form when weak. Harrys scar burns
anytime he gets near Voldemort or has a mental connection with him.
Frodos mind, soul, and body are both hurt when he wears the ring of power
and when he goes nearer to Lord Sauron at Mount Doom. As far as taking
non-bodily forms, Lord Voldemort was able, by drinking unicorn blood, to use
professor Quirrells body as a house for whatever amount of his soul was left.

Yates 6

Lord Sauron was able to present himself as a massive eye in place over a
tower in Mordor.
Despite these obvious connections between Rowlings and Tolkiens
novels that nearly anyone who has read them can point out, Rowling totally
denies any connection between the two when asked. She claims any
similarities between the two novels are "Fairly superficial. Tolkien created a
whole new mythology, which I would never claim to have done. On the other
hand, I think I have better jokes. She even claims to never have even read
The Hobbit until after her first Harry Potter book was written, though she had
read the Lord of the Rings as a child. Rowling goes even further to say there
is no connection because "Me. I truly never sat down and thought, What do I
think kids will like? I really, really was so inflamed by the idea when it came
to me because I thought it would be so much fun to write. In fact, I dont
really like fantasy. According to Rowling, she didnt even realize she was
writing fantasy until about three fourths of the way through when she
thought about the unicorns. Although she completely denies any direct
connection between hers and Tolkiens novels, that does not rule out many
influences. Just because she did not sit down with the Lord of the Rings and
The Hobbit and translate them into wizards, does not mean she did not have
some of the ideas presented in the Lord of the Rings mixed in with her
streams of ideas while writing Harry Potter.
Every work is influenced by something from the past, no matter what it
is or who created it. Its difficult to determine whether a work is taken

Yates 7

directly from Tolkiens works because really only the author knows that for
sure. Harry Potter is one series of novels in which one could find many
similarities between the two, but The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit can
be found in tons of books across history if you know what you are looking for.