The Ring and the Rings: Wagner vs Tolkien

Check this out

 

*yawn* this is old news to me. Shore's music is *very* un-Wagnerian in tonality. The only Wagnerian moment I can think of is in Bree - it's the bit of music used on the 2-disc FOtR menu.

Anyway, Jackson cd. hardly handle Tolkien, the complexities of Wagnerian drama are beyond his wildest aspirations - and Wagner's dialogue was almost as bad as Jackson's!

 

I read an article once for school explaining why Tolkien was not basing his stuff off of Wagner.

But that's another story.

 

Yeah, just because they both are about a ring, everyone starts to compare them...

That is a pretty poorly written piece. Clearly the author is just fishing for an audience and has never done any real music analysis.

 

I thought the article was pretty good. LOTR is just a bowdlerized and bastardized version of Norse and Germanic myths (including Wagner), with a few spoonfulls of Celtic and Finnish thrown in. For Tolkien to claim there was no influence was disingenuous.

It would be like Lucas denying the influence of The Hidden Fortress and The Searchers.

 

Actually, Tolkien never cared much for Wagner or his take on the old Norse sagas. He didn't particularly like Shakespeare either, which is why whenever some reviewer calls his dialogue "Shakespearian", it's kind of ironic!