Dulrag's story eerily similar to Thorin Oakenshield in The Hobbit by Tolkien?
johntyl
Member Posts: 397
I recently finished watching the Hobbit trilogy and can't help noticing the eerie resemblance between some of the story elements found in the dwarf Thorin's family and Durlag's own. Is this just a coincidence or am I overthinking?
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The underlying story elements are usually recurring themes throughout literary history, there are very few truly original stories.
By now, most sufficiently complex and deep worlds (and Forgotten Realms/DnD is definitely that) have come up with enough explanations and background lore to make them original enough that Tolkien is just an inspiration, and there are probably more differences to his concepts than there are similarities.
You can check some of the many very informative wikis on DnD worlds to find out more about races like elves etc. It's very well explained, mostly.
But other than that yeah, heh, funny how that works. It's like D&D is heavily inspired by tolkiens world or something. Would like to point of that Tolkien was trying to make a European mythology with his writing, which is why so many things are from other tales. Thier not "borrowed" in a way you're supposed to not notice and think he made it all up, thier shared with and connected to other classics intentionally to make the world bigger and more real.
For example in the dark ages some Britons lived in sod housed built into hills, like hobbit holes. Also, Theodin, the name of thing king of Rohan means "king" in some old English language (I forget which one), and so does his fathers name, and his grandfathers name.
FR halflings are essentially Tolkien's hobbits, which were purely Tolkien's own invention and not based on prior legends, but FR has to call them "halflings" because the word "hobbit" is IP of the Tolkien estate.
FR dwarves are very like Tolkien's dwarves, but Tolkien based them on prior legends so this influence isn't specifically attributable to Tolkien.
FR elves are only vaguely similar to Tolkien's elves, and in particular do not share Tolkien's origin story for the eldar.
FR orcs are not much like Tolkien's orcs, but instead are quite like Tolkien's uruk-hai, and both orcs and uruk-hai were Tolkiens' own inventions (although fortunately his estate doesn't claim copyright over the word "orc").
FR gnomes are not based upon anything in Tolkien, his works don't have gnomes at all.