The Top Ten Books That Influenced J.R.R. Tolkien

2011 at 10am     Posted by Rebecca Schinsky

I’ve had a soft spot for Tolkien ever since my father read The Hobbit to me as a bedtime story more than twenty years ago. I’ve recognized his influence in countless works by contemporary authors, and I’ve always wondered who influenced him. At last, answers! My friend Chris Kubica is a database developer by day and a writer by night, and he runs ePublishing startup neverend media in his “spare” time. He’s here today with a well-researched guest post—think of it as a hypothetical Bare Necessities—about the top ten books that influenced J.R.R. Tolkien. Find Chris on Twitter @chriskubica.

I’m a sci-fi and fantasy buff and have spent many years building (and reading and enjoying) a sizable library of classics in both genres. I keep coming back, as many do, to The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings trilogy by J. R. R. Tolkien, though, and have re-read each several times. My daughter, Isabella, is just about old enough that very soon I will delight in reading The Hobbit to her aloud as a bedtime story.

Tolkien’s books are classics, of course, and most people I know have read them. But over the years I’ve been fascinated to discover that most people believe that Tolkien single-handedly invented the fantasy genre and before him there was nothing written that could be called what we understand as the fantasy genre…that before him there were fairy tales and before that Greek (and other) myths and before that, the unknown (unknown to my friends and acquaintances, at least). To be honest, I wasn’t sure what came before Tolkien either and I certainly wasn’t aware of what specifically influenced Tolkien’s famous works until I did a little digging…in paper books at first and also online.

I’ve discovered there are many-score books out there that have directly influenced Mr. Tolkien, that we know of, and I thought it would be fun to write briefly about ten of those here—the top ten books that influenced Tolkien, at least in my opinion. Thankfully, most of these books are still in print and available to buy or check out at your local library and if they aren’t in print, many of them are old enough to be in the public domain and thus freely available online or via a free eBook download.

Note: This isn’t an exhaustive list and is totally Chris-Kubica-isn’t-a-credentialed-literature-scholar-subjective, but I’ll bet you haven’t heard of all of these books before!

I’d be happy to hear other people’s thoughts on these and other un-mentioned-here Tolkien influences in the comments.

1. Beowulf by Anonymous

Beowulf is a classic tale of good vs. evil that pits the hero, Beowulf, against two monsters and a dragon. Tolkien was Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford University from 1925 to 1945 and read and wrote extensively about Beowulf and other Old- and Middle English epic poetry. Tolkien delivered a seminal lecture on Beowulf called “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics” in 1936 and a hard-to-find book on the subject, “Beowulf and the Critics”—which collects much of Tolkien’s Beowulf scholarship in one place—came out in 2002. Tolkien even translated Beowulf himself (his hand-written translation was discovered in 2003).

2. The Worm Ouroboros by Eric Rücker Eddison

This very densely written and highly imaginative fantasy novel about a heroic King versus the Lords of Demonland was published in 1922. While Tolkien didn’t buy the philosophical beliefs put forth in the novel and denied that Eddison was an influence on his own writing, he nonetheless once wrote in a letter that “I still think of [Eddison] as the greatest and most convincing writer of ‘invented worlds’ that I have read.” The term “middle Earth” is used in the book, too, to describe the place where the characters live. Eddison was also a sometime guest reader at meetings of The Inklings, an informal literary discussion group at Oxford University that counted Tolkien and Chronicles of Narnia author, C. S. Lewis among its members.

3.  The Prose Edda by (probably) Snorri Sturluson and the Poetic Edda by Anonymous

Both of these are quintessential classics of Ancient Norse literature, poetry and mythology. Tolkien wrote about, lectured on and translated these works himself over the course of many years at Oxford University. In addition, many character names like “Gimli” derive directly from Norse mythology. “Gandalf” can be translated as “magic elf” in Old Norse and many believe that Gandalf is inspired by Odin, one of the main Gods in Norse mythology.

4.  The Marvelous Land of the Snergs, by A. E. Wyke-Smith

Tolkien called this 1927 collection of tales about a Hobbit-like character (a Snerg) named Gorbo (who is “only slightly taller than the average table”) a “Sourcebook” for The Hobbit and read the book to his children. Read more about the similarity between Snergs and Hobbits here.

5. The House of the Wolfings and The Roots of the Mountains by William Morris

Tolkien read these early fantasy novel reconstructions of early Germanic life as a child and was profoundly influenced by them. In particular, the name “Gandolf” can be found in these books and scholars suggest that Gollum and The Dead Marshes from The Lord of the Rings draw inspiration from Morris’s works. Fangorn forest and the character of Wormtongue are also said to be inspired by characters from Morris.

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