Replies

“...Wagner was reverse engineered by Lord of the Rings into a giant blessing.” [ckilmer, post 11]

“...If anything Tolkien took Wagner’s Idea.” [partyrepub, post 24]

“...Tolkien by contrast set out to repurpose the old pagan stories to make them a sounder foundation for the Christianity that would succeed them...” [David P Goldman, cited approvingly by DiogenesLamp in post 72]

Forum members who see parallels - or causality - between Der Ring Des Nibelungen and The Lord of the Rings have too much time on their hands. And they are too in love with conspiracies. Or, they are searching for a doctoral dissertation topic by force-fitting their own fantasies onto words that simply cannot go together.

Der Ring Des Nibelungen is Germanic.

The Lord of the Rings is English.

The appearance of a “Ring” in both stories is a coincidence.

In Der Ring Des Nibelungen, the Ring was not even a ring to begin with. It was a magical material with power, but no moral content. The characters imbued it with good or evil according to their own qualities.

In the Lord of the Rings, the ring was first a maguffin. The author had to rewrite major portions of his alternate cosmology to make everything fit. And while the One Ring was indubitably, irretrievably evil, bear in mind that the author stated flatly that “...nothing was evil in the beginning. Even Sauron was not so...”

I’d put less importance on a stray comment JRR Tolkien made to a BBC interviewer, than his written words in the preface to some edition of The Lord of the Rings, where he denied the tale had any purpose beyond “a really long tale” spun by a tale-teller, to entertain, captivate, move readers.

In other written comments, Professor Tolkien remarked that there was no specifically “English” mythology or legend, and that he created hobbits in part to make up for that lack. He certainly did not do it to convert readers to Christianity. No matter how many rabbis or American fundamentalists wish otherwise.

Not everything is imbued with morality. As Americans, we make a mistake to believe such: it overcomplicates and oversimplifies our perception of reality, all at once.