Who Asked: Alicia
NaNo-novel: Undecided
Answer: It’s hard to identify any one source of inspiration for the Lord of the Rings books. Perhaps, you mean the first inspiration. Langford writes, “The road to Middle-Earth began in the late 1890s when seven-year-old Tolkien, fired by reading the Nordic legend of Sigurd killing the dragon Fafnir in Andrew Lang's Red Fairy Book, tried to write his own story about a dragon. This was mercifully lost to the world.”
One of the strongest inspirations Tolkien found was Beowulf. Medieval Forum reports, “. . . as Drout rightly observes earlier, ‘the single best way to understand and appreciate Tolkien’s fiction is to become literate in medieval literature’ He believes that nothing would please Tolkien more than forreaders of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings to be moved to read Beowulf to see what in the poem inspired Tolkien for so many years (xiii).”
But you can’t ignore other influences such as Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, various Norse sagas and myths, and Macbeth.
Think about the influences on your own writing, especially if you, like Tolkien, are writing fantasy. You’ll get much more believable results if you, too, read the literature and fantasy which has already been written.
I hope you can apply this in your novel.
Thank you for playing Stump the Librarian!
Amber
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