Tolkien’s Middle Earth and D&D

A Coming-of-Age Story
Once upon a time there was a professor in England who wrote tales of a fantasy world which he called Middle-earth. In many ways this fantasy realm resembles our own world, although much is also different. Technology in the good professor’s Middle-earth resembles our dark ages or medieval times long ago in the sense that folks went to war using horses, armor and swords. There are men and women in his stories that seem much like ourselves, but there were also creatures of legend and imagination in Middle-earth. An in the historic middle ages, there is magic in Middle-earth!
Professor Tolkien was a well educated college professor and for inspiration he drew upon many sources. The fairy tales and traditional stories about the knights of King Arthur, which he had first read as a youth, and from his experience of war as a soldier during the Great War of 1914-18, and also from his academic study of historical sources such as the epic of Beowulf, he borrowed ideas to include in his Middle-earth. To the roots of these inspirations, the good professor added a great deal of his own personal creativity and his active imagination, and he gave to our world a very engaging tale, or two, of an epic struggle between the forces of good and that of evil. A tale that from the time of its first publication right up to the present day has captivated an eager audience.
Coinciding with the rising popularity of Professor Tolkien's fantastic fictional Middle-earth has been the publication and growth of a little tabletop fantasy game which has changed first the wargaming hobby and ultimately entered popular culture bringing a widespread awareness to many of those same fantasy themes found in Middle Earth. The world’s first role-playing game did not claim to be based on Middle-earth and it contains many elements drawn from sources of inspiration other than the good professor, some quite contrary to the subject matter found in the creation of the notable college professor. There was however enough overlapping themes between the two phenomena to make both products appealing to a number of people who came to enjoy both game and fiction. In fact, the popularity of the tales of Middle-earth and of games based on the original fantasy role-playing ideas have continued to grow right up to our present time. we are told that the hobby of fantasy role-playing has never been more popular. Fantasy tropes have become widely known and appear in computer, video and console games, in movies and other media and of course in many novels written in the wake of the Middle-earth volumes. Today elves, wizards and hobbits can be seen throughout much of our popular culture. It's been a grand journey.