Sword & Sorcery and Tolkien

Roots of the Hobby
Sword & Sorcery (S&S), as a sub-genre of fantastic fiction, typically deals with the personal adventures of one or two heroes of often dubious morality as they face and generally overcome perils and one or two adversaries bent on doing them, or a beautiful damsel, harm. Seldom is the S&S story about world shaping events or the struggle of good and evil. Often the hero is a rebel, a bit of a scoundrel. Seldom do elves, dwarves or hobbits make an appearance. Those tropes are the stock of high fantasy popularized by J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings (LotR) and The Hobbit.
At the time E. Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson were creating and publishing the white box, Tolkien was becoming a very popular author and redefining fantastic literature. Mr. Gygax alleged the works of Tolkien had very little influence on the white box, yet Tolkien properties such as the Ent, Hobbit, Balrog and Nazgul make their appearance in the pages of the original Little Brown Books. I could argue that the popularity of Tolkien's LotR was at least partially responsible for the success of that early game.
Another huge influence on the creators of the white box and it's players were the many writings of popular sword & sorcery, science fiction, and sword & planet authors whose names appear in the Dungeon Masters Guide Appendix N. I had already read a number of the authors whose names are on that list when I first discovered the white box, so sharing in that type of adventure through the means of the white box game seemed a natural extension of my love of heroic adventure stories. S&S stories at the time definitely outnumbered the works of Tolkien (although the imitators of Tolkien are now legion) and perhaps had a greater influence overall on the game's development. Since the advent of white box, it definitely seems high fantasy is the preferred style of play with S&S games ranking a distant second.
While players generally enjoy reading S&S stories, my experience has been there is a preference for high fantasy in play. The nature of magic may account for part of this preference. Magic in S&S is often low-key, dangerous and generally used by the bad guys rather than the heroes. One of the appeals to playing a fantasy game is the inherent "magic", that is real within the game setting be available to them as players. Many players naturally like to use the "magic" themselves through their PCs and the flashier the better! The grim realism of S&S can mean combat is more deadly and players generally dislike losing their PCs. Fantasy races, those other than human, seem to attract players in a disproportionate manner. Elves, dwarves and gnomes frequently outnumber human PCs at the game-tables I have been present at. Saving the world from the ultimate bad-guy seems to hold way more appeal than the often less epic/glamorous adventures more typical of S&S.
White box is characteristic of what generally followed in the hobby since it contains S&S elements within a system that seems geared more to high fantasy play. Games strictly adhering to S&S tropes are rare both in print and at the table, but it isn't hard to identify a bit of S&S in many high fantasy games. The LotR itself, generally associated with the label high fantasy (another sub-genre), upon close scrutiny seems to also contain elements of S&S; the small personal struggles of some characters exist within the context of the larger good verses evil, world in the balance struggle, the rebel is there even if he is of royal (or hobbit) blood, and the dark magic of Sauron definitely has a corrupting influence.
After watching Peter Jackson's LotR trilogy with my old daddy (age 92), he remarked, "So that's what you and your friends have been playing all these years." What could I say, but "Yeah, Dad, that's pretty much it."