J. R. R. Tolkien's influences J. R. R. Tolkien's influences While highly creative, the fiction of J. R. R. Tolkien was influenced by a number of sources. Tolkien was inspired by his academic fields of philology and early Germanic literature, especially poetry and mythology, as well as a wide range of other beliefs, culture, and experiences. "The Lord of the Rings" is a sequel to "The Hobbit" and so shares influences with it. At the same time, it is a novel which is much greater in scale and scope and so encompasses many other influences as well. Tolkien once described "The Lord of the Rings"
J. R. R. Tolkien Award for Best Fantasy novel in 1978. In 1980 Christopher Tolkien published a collection of more fragmentary material, under the title "Unfinished Tales of Númenor and Middle-earth". In subsequent years (1983–1996) he published a large amount of the remaining unpublished materials, together with notes and extensive commentary, in a series of twelve volumes called "The History of Middle-earth". They contain unfinished, abandoned, alternative, and outright contradictory accounts, since they were always a work in progress for Tolkien and he only rarely settled on a definitive version for any of the stories. There is not complete consistency between "The Lord of