Exactly.
What’s with ‘King’s answer to Lord of the Rings’?
Has King ever stated that?
King has written that his generation's mythology, and the fiction that grew from it was largely influenced by LOTR. His original intent was not so much "an answer" to LOTR, but to develop a mythology of similar sweeping, epic proportions. He was also heavily influenced by the Eastwood "man with no name" spaghetti westerns. A few years back, leading up to the publication of #VII, the reprint of the earlier paperbacks had a pretty extensive foreward esplaining where his influences came from, where they had taken him, and where he was going.