Per this New Yorker article
I don’t know enough about the Ring Cycle’s plotline. Got a synopsis?
You have to remember that Tolkien lied through his teeth about every aspect of the books, from denying that they were allegorical about the World War taking place outside his doorstep as he wrote to his blanket disassociation from all fictional sources after AD 1200 to his bland dismissal that Middle Earth and its peoples resembled Europe and surrounding areas in any way.
Of all the authors in history not to be trusted about their own works, I think Tolkien leads the list. Just an opinion, of course. 
They are not, and he wrote a short rejection of what exactly he would have done differently if he’d meant it that way.
They don’t really. He more or less based the Hobbits on his ideal life in England, but I don’t think you can match the Rohirrim and Gondor to anything beyond “These peope have pale skin”.
The fact was and is that the books more or less have very little to do with anything in history, and the plot of the The Ring of the Nibelung is nothing like Tolkein. He wasn’t kidding about the Rings being round - and there the similarities largely end.
I don’t believe Sauron “gave up” his body to become the eye…his body was destroyed when he lost the ring originally, and he needed the ring to take physical form again.
Also, when asking “why” people covet the ring, you have to understand it’s not a concious choice to desire it. People desire the ring for reasons they cannot control or understand.
Has the person making the comparison in the OP even read the books, or just seen the movie?
Wagner’s Ring Cycle was the first thing I thought of when I first encountered The Lord of the Rings. It is a trilogy that revolves around an all powerfull ring forged within the earth. The story revolves around various characters desperately trying to attain the ring. The Ring destroys those who do bear it. It has dragons, goblins and all that kind of jazz. There is even a Gollum-like character who posses the ring for a time. A shattered sword plays into the story as well. Ultimately, the ring is destroyed in fire at the end bringing death to the gods and ushering in the time of men.
I’m not saying JRRT ripped off his story (there are many differences as well), but I think it would be hard to deny ANY influence.
Listen to Anna Russell 
Seriously, I read this article, and have recently reread both Tolkien and the Wagner librettos. It is hard to believe that Tolkien was not influenced by the folklore at the heart of Wagner’s story, if not the story directly.
Tolkien’s ring is more of a Maguffin, in that its discovery initiated the resolution of a conflict that already existed. Wagner’s ring, though not as involved in the story, is actually more responsible for the situation, and is more integral to the story. I could almost imagine a Lord of the Rings about the war protecting Frodo while he builds a holy hand grenade from plans thought to be lost, while being tempted, perhaps, to keep it and rule the world.
A similarity in both is that at the end the immortals are gone and humans take over. In both the ring corrupts, Gollum and Fafnir, and Wotan to an extent. (Alberich seemed corrupted already.) In Wagner the lump of gold is restored to the Rhine, in Tolkien the Shire is restored, and in both cases the heros are gone at the end of the story.
I think Ross’s most interesting point is how in Wagner the ring is conquered by love, where no such thing happens in Tolkien.
It seems there must have been some influence, but not major influence, so Tolkien was more right than not.
Maybe not primarily, but there is little doubt that he intended to draw some parallels. It’s difficult for me to imagine him referring to the principal players (on both sides of the conflict) as “Orcs” in his correspondence with his son, while he was still working on the books, and still maintaining total insulation between the content of the books and the world in which he lived.
I can understand him objecting to suggestions that he cribbed significant portions of the plot from any one source, but of course he evokes plenty of previous works. I remain highly skeptical that he abstained from the influence anything after the 14th Century, too – I perceive a few colours from Macbeth in The Two Towers, for example. (ie; Birnam Wood’s apparent advance on Dunsinane at the climax, together with Macbeth’s forboding observation that “Stones have been known to move, and trees to speak.”) Of course, it’s possible that Shakespeare was himself riffing on earlier tales with which JRR would certainly have been in a position to be familiar with. There is no new thing under the sun, after all.
“…the Encyclopedia Brittanica, where I get all my information…”
My understanding is that Tolkien and Wagner were working from much the same mythology.
I meant “after the 12th century.”
Bit of a tangle, there, as my thoughts jumped ahead to old Bill.
Wow! Is she still around? I saw her nearly twenty years ago and she was pushing 80 then. A really spry 80, I might add.
DD
As much as Tolkien disclaimed any modern influence (which is, as LM states, anything after the 12th century) I’m sure he was at least unconsciously influenced to some minor degree by the both Wagner and Shakespeare.
But let us not forget what he was trying to accomplish. Tolkien felt that English culture had been robbed of its heritage by the invasion of the Normans and the loss of the old English oral mythology. The only surviving legend is that of Beowulf and I would be willing to bet J.R.R. found it a bit thin as a representative mythology of the ancient Anglish. So he set out to create his own mythos. Now add to this mix his fascination with the Finnish Kalavala and I think you’ll find it has much more of an influence on his entire mythos than the business with Wagner and his little wussy-ring. For example, the Kalavala has as its central hero a sort of a wizard very similar to Gandalf. Unfortunately my knowledge of Finnish mythos is rather limited and that’s about as far as I can go. Anyone else?
Wagner was himself inspired by a book called: ‘Nibelungenlied’. Great book!
Read it here: http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/OMACL/Nibelungenlied/
Might also want to check this out: http://www.sacred-texts.com/neu/tml/index.htm
This is a much more complicated question than it sounds, considering that Tolkien’s ring didn’t start out as The One Ring of Lord of the Rings. Instead it began as an “ordinary” magic ring in The Hobbit. There it only had the power to grant invisibility, nothing more.
When it came time to develop a sequel to The Hobbit, Tolkien at some point transformed the one-gimmick ring into something far more grandiose. Was Wagner the inspiration? Or did the fact that Bilbo already had that ring simply make it a convenient McGuffin for an idea that Tolkien developed independently? The former sounds likely, but the latter is at least possible.
Beyond the idea of an all-powerful ring that must be destroyed, though, I don’t see much influence from Wagner to Tolkien. Scott is confused because they both used the same medieval mythologies as their base.
It’s like those Star Wars fanboys who accuse Howard Shore of ripping off John Williams, when in fact they’re both ripping off Wagner.
This is just silly. A writer in a major magazine has apparently never heard of the lust for power or the fact that feeding an addiction inevitably leads to reduced satisfaction and a search for ever-increasing amounts of the addictive thing.
I’d love to comment, but I still get lost when trying to dechipehr the plot of “Gotterdamrung”. I guess it’s because it seemingly has little or no connection whatsoever to the first three parts of the ring cycle.
But to believe this, you have to believe Tolkien. And you can’t do that.
More or less!!!
And I wasn’t referring to the Rohirrim and Gondor. Tolkien has been accused of racism many times for his depictions of the peoples of the east and south. I tend to agree.
You cannot read the book as an adult and take Tolkien’s account of it seriously. He would have to be the most self-deluded author in history. And the book is too obviously deliberately written and coded for that to be true.
blinks Wow. Tolkien was a self-deluded liar? Ad hominem much? Either hock up evidence of the man being caught in a lie or go home. I tend to believe that, while not allegorical specifically, LoTR deals with so many common themes from history and life that we can all find very suitable allegories in our own existence. For example: the Ring is the Ring, nothing more, but within it we can find symbolism of the drive for power, nuclear energy, the will of evil, etc. Trying to say “this is what it means and only this” is preposterous and demeaning to a very complex piece of work.
As for there being no link at all between LoTR and Wagner’s opera, I would say “don’t be silly”. I’m sure a man holding a professor’s chair at Oxford would at least have known what the play was about and it probably did influence him. I don’t think, however, he consciously set out to model anything on the Ring Saga. At most he might’ve been scrambling around for a good plot device and drawn on the opera for an inspiration that fit his independent story.
The Hobbits were based on English countryfolk as Tolkien envisioned they ought to be. The Rohirrim derived significant inspiration from Nordic culture, yet also were significantly different in that they were dependent upon horse travel. The Gondorians, to my mind, have no particularly accurate parrells in history. And as for the Haradrim thing being racist… perhaps it was. J.R.R. Tolkien was a man of his times and he grew up in a racist era. Yet his books preach a message of tolerance between races, mercy for all, and an understanding of the horrors of war. I believe he wrote a monologue for Sam which was put in Faramir’s mouth in TTT Extended Edition basically looking at a dead man and wondering what he had been like, whether he was particularly evil or just one schlub doing his duty as he saw it. Whether or not Tolkien inserted racism into the books, he also inserted the human compassion for the enemy that many WWI veterans took from the trenches.
“Trying to say ‘this is what it means and only this’ is preposterous and demeaning to a very complex piece of work.”
True. That’s why I object when Tolkien himself does it.