Search results
Results From The WOW.Com Content Network
The fantasy writings of J. R. R. Tolkien have had a huge popular impact. His Middle-earth books have sold hundreds of millions of copies. [1] [2] The Lord of the Rings transformed the genre of fantasy writing. [3] It and The Hobbit have spawned Peter Jackson's Middle-earth films, which have had billion-dollar takings at the box office.
Tolkien read Morris and Magnússon's translation of the Völsunga Saga as a student. [39] Tolkien was influenced by Germanic heroic legend, especially its Norse and Old English forms. During his education at King Edward's School in Birmingham, he read and translated from the Old Norse in his free time.
Celtic influences on Middle-earth:Tolkien's Elves owe something to the Irish Tuatha Dé Danann; [1] their sanctuary of Rivendell recalls Tír na nÓg; [2] the Undying Lands echo Immrama tales; [3] [4] their Sindarin language uses some aspects of Welsh language; [5] [6] and Maedhros and Celebrimbor reflect aspects of Nuada Airgetlám.
J. R. R. Tolkien's bestselling fantasy novel The Lord of the Rings had an initial mixed literary reception. Despite some enthusiastic early reviews from supporters such as W. H. Auden, Iris Murdoch, and C. S. Lewis, scholars noted a measure of literary hostility to Tolkien, which continued until the start of the 21st century.
The popularity of Tolkien's books has had a small but lasting effect on the use of language in fantasy literature in particular, and even on mainstream dictionaries, which now commonly accept Tolkien's idiosyncratic spellings dwarves and dwarvish (alongside dwarfs and dwarfish), which had been little used since the mid-19th century and earlier.
The 2005–2010 Narnia film trilogy adapted from the novel series by Tolkien's friend C. S. Lewis were produced due to the popularity of The Lord of the Rings. George R. R. Martin acknowledged that Tolkien influenced his 2011–2019 Game of Thrones TV series and novels about medieval fantasy, while speaking about a movie about Tolkien's life.
Tolkien and the Classical World is a 2021 scholarly collection of essays on the influence from ancient Greek and Roman civilisations on J. R. R. Tolkien's Middle-earth writings, especially The Silmarillion and The Lord of the Rings. It is edited by Hamish Williams, with an afterword by Graham Shipley that comments on the book and its themes ...
Middle-earth video games at E3 2011. Tolkien's influence extends to role-playing games including Gary Gygax's 1974 Dungeons & Dragons. [67] Gygax was obliged, after a lawsuit, to rename some especially Tolkienesque types of character, such as Hobbits (which became "Halflings"), Nazgul (which became "Wraiths") and the Balrog (which became "Balor").