[Siidney]

The Three Elven Lords have used the Three tools forged by the Master Smith to rebel against the gods, steal divine power and create their own enchanted realms. Their people has already rebelled against the gods once, and left their island in the west in order to found their own land.

However, now the reawakened Evil Overlord seeks to control both The Three and The One. Towards the end of the Third Era, he seeks to bend all free people to his will. His monster hordes threaten to flood the land, and Mount Doom spews menacing ash clouds.

Reluctantly, one of the Three Elven Lords sends an orhpaned hero on a covert mission to Mount Doom. The only way to stop the Evil Overlord is to destroy The One, at the terrible price of breaking the power of The Three, and the Evil Overlord is too obsessed with his lust for the power of The One to suspect that someone would willingly forfeit it. At the end, one of his avatars launches a surprise attack to stop the orphan hero, but falls into the lava of Mount Doom...

Am I stretching the anology too far, or does the esteemed audience agree that the above is the essential plot of both Morrowind and The Lord of the Rings? Don't tell me "Oh, but Tolkien's elves are immaculate angelic beings whose poop smells of flowers!". They're not. Galadriel and consorts are actively continuing Feanor's rebellion against the Valar through their blasphemous sub-creation of small Undying Lands in Middle Earth. The Three Elven Rings weren't forged by Sauron, but Celebrimbor ("Kagrenac") used the craft taught to the elves by Sauron.

[Laura Shipley]

There certainly are some similarities, and maybe the story of Morrowind was inspired on the story of the lord of the rings. But I wouldn't go as far as saying that Bethesda ripped off the story from Tolkien nor that the ES universe is supposed to be some sort of copy cat of the LOTR universe, not that I'm saying that that is what you're saying. Inspiring something on something else is fine in my book, so while it's cool to bring up the similarities, I don't think we need to start linking every event between the two universes. Just my opinion.

[Lucky Girl]

It's certainly a funny coincidence when presented like that, but the anecdote is more representative of Lord of the Rings than Morrowind. For one, the Dwemer throw a socket wrench into the whole comparison. I don't believe there was any Foul Murder and outright usurpation on the part of the Elven Ringbearers. And furthermore, the One Ring didn't make Sauron evil, but the reverse; in TES it is the Doom-Drum that corrupts Dagoth Ur, who prior to that was the sixth member of the Velothi sixtet, along with ALMSIVI, Nerevar, and Alandro Sul.

Furthermore, Sauron without the Ring could still have wrecked Middle-earth just fine, but the good guys had the One Ring and had to take it on a journey to destroy it. Dagoth Ur, on the other hand, only existed as he did because of the Heart, he was helpless without it, and he never lost its power like Sauron did with his Ring.

So no, I don't really buy this.

[Romy Welsch]

At its very basic, reduced, simplified core, the plot of Morrowind is nothing new as MK admitted, cliched even. And that's true of almost all stories. It's the little nuances that make it different and interesting in its own right.

[Chica Cheve]

All fantasy is indebted to Tolkien to some degree or another, but despite both plots' involving volcanoes and dark gods, I wouldn't say they're the same, as Mdnthrvst pointed out.

And yeah, while Galadriel may on the one hand represent the closest thing to pure good in Middle-earth in the Third Age (ten thousand years of suffering will do that to you), the conclusion of The Silmarillion can only lead one to conclude that she definitely was not immune to the flaw of hubris that was the downfall of her half-uncle and indeed all the Noldorin Exiles.

[Robert]

TES started off as a generic RPG (with bikini armour!), all RPG from that time period takes inspirations from D&D, which in turns takes inspirations from stories like LotR (or the other way round?), which takes inspirations from myths and legends. In the end, does it matter?

[Rob Davidson]

I'd almost be tempted to say that TES sometimes riffs on Tolkien on purpose in order to break its cliches. There's the superficial parallel you pointed out here, and there are others too, but the specifics are very different. Beautiful, virtuous elves? Well, TES has alien-looking slavers and elven supremacists. Both have one god who creates a bunch of lesser spirits, which go on to make the world until their plans are corrupted by a trickster. Ilúvatar is supposed to be the purest good; Anu is a suffering, delusional spirit in sensory deprivation. Melkor wanted to rule the world, Lorkhan wanted to... well, it's hard to say, it changes depending on whose story you believe. Devise a means to an end to CHIM/Amaranth, maybe.

When mortal humans need the gods, an Ainur sends Gandalf. An Aedra sends Pelinal. I think that sort of says it all. I mean, Tolkien is great, but he admittedly never wrote about homicidal rage-droids from the future. ("O Manw?, for our shared madness I do this!...")

In fact that might actually be the difference. Tolkien and universes inspired by his Middle-Earth works, like D&D, have black-and-white morality. There is an absolute concept of good and evil. With a few exceptions, in Middle-Earth elves are good. Orcs are bad. In D&D, you're a Paladin if you're good, and a Blackguard if you're bad. You can't be a Paladin doing bad things for good reasons, or a Blackguard doing good things to advance a bad goal; it would change your alignment.

Morgoth doesn't believe that he's enslaving the Noldor for the good of Middle-Earth, he just hates elves and wants to spite the other Ainur. Sauron is not working towards any sort of greater good when he convinces the men of Númenor to worship Morgoth. Conversely, Galadriel turned down the Ring as a direct result of being good. She wasn't so much tempted by the thought of becoming a terrible Queen, as the Ring itself was trying to corrupt her; it's not the act of turning it down which made her good, she already just was.

TES, on the other hand, has a relative concept of morality. I think it often riffs off LOTR and co. specifically in order to point this out. The Dunmer aren't enslaving other races because they hate them; they don't even think of them as people in the same way that they are. When someone isn't a person, the same rights don't apply to them, and in your eyes they don't have to feel injustice or suffering as keenly as you do (if you recognised that they did, no normal, right-minded person would be able to do it). The Thalmor aren't trying to spit in the Godhead's eye; from their point of view, they're trying to save all people from the endless suffering of the Mundus.

It's a more realistic way of going about it, since here in the real world, nobody does things for the sake of being evil. Every destructive, evil organisation that ever was thought that they were working towards a good and righteous goal. It might have been a united nation, or to save people's souls, or personal wealth and power, but they thought that it was a morally good goal. (And continue to think that.)

But this isn't to say that it's necessarily better to portray morality either way, or that either way makes for a more successful story; they're just different. I think it's a nice change for fantasy, however.

[adam holden]

The thing with LoTR is that so much of the stuff that doesn't make it a black and white world are not in the "famous" works. They're in works that werer unpublished in Tolkien's lifetime. Anyone who reads The Silmarillion will tell you that the eleves are most definitely not perfect as the main plot of that book hinges on someone getting greedy/prideful in a land that's supposed to be perfect. The way they're portrayed in LoTR is only after decades of millennia of hardship. Tolken himself had problems with his "orcs are corrupted elves" theory as Tolkien's orcs are Always Chaotic Evil and Tolkien knew enough theology to know that they should have souls. The trouble is, people aren't going to read that stuff if they don't go looking for it. It's not like TES where the grey-and-grey morality is extremely obvious, if not in-you-face.

[Brιonα Renae]

...and just for the sake of it, two interesting articles about Tolkien and that other ring, der Ring des Nibelungen:
http://isteve.blogspot.com/2012/06/how-much-was-tolkiens-rings-influenced.html
http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2003/12/22/031222crat_atlarge?currentPage=all

[Vicky Keeler]

The one thing I really loved about Morrowind was that it was so different to D&D / Tolkien. Oblivion was a serious let down in this department imo.

[Ebony Lawson]

The only thing about Oblivion that I felt was really off was the lack of the Roman style armor on the Imperial Guards. (Well that and the fact Cyrodill wasn't a rainforest)

[Rebecca Clare Smith]

...You do know that LotR predates DnD by several decades, and The Hobbit and the earliest drafts of The Silmarillion by more than half a century, right...?

This. This is one of the many complaints I have about Jackson's adaptations; he made the orcs far too monstrous. The way I see it, the orcs are supposed to be a reminder that there's a monster inside all of us; you don't get that when the orcs make the undead look glamorous.

[Mrs. Patton]

The problem I had with The Lord of the Rings is Tolkein's prose. It was just so dry and listless. I got a ways into The Two Towers and my endurance gave out. It was something involving Pipen and Treebeard and it was the first time I just looked up from a book and said "I'm done."

Dresden Files, The Rift War, Honorverse, Safehold, Wheel of Time (freakin' Jordan...), Empire of Man, Posleen...I'm accustomed to long books and lengthy word counts but Tolkein's writing is just impenetrable for me.

[Kelly James]

I see what you're saying; I could have stood to make it clearer that Tolkien's elves can be bad. When I was referring to "good, pure" elves, I was mostly referring to the simplified cliche in popular fantasy which was inspired by people misunderstanding Tolkien's works. As I didn't make that plain, I can't argue against your point there.

I wouldn't ever claim that Tolkien's elves are always purely good. I can't say that the Kinslaying of the Teleri wasn't evil by any stretch of the imagination (and the other Kinslayings, come to that). Then there's Eol forcing Turgon's sister to marry him, Maeglin bringing about the downfall of Gondolin... and I think in the Unfinished Tales there's a few lines in The Fall of Gondolin about elves who become corrupted by Morgoth during long years of slavery, and serve him hoping to advance in his court. Maeglin might even have been one of them, as far as I remember-- captured, tortured in Angband, and set free to do his bidding? Something like that? It's been a while. And one of my favourite bits of the Narn i H?n Húrin is that elf who makes snide comments about Túrin like, "The men of Dor-lómin are so wild and fell, what are the women of that place like? Do they run naked like deer, clad only in their own hair?" Making rude comments about your womenfolk isn't evil of course, but it's not pure and good either. (It's great to talk to someone who's read the less popular texts, by the way.)

However, what I was trying to say-- and probably didn't succeed-- is that even if individuals in Tolkien's work do evil things, the morality itself never changes. You don't do bad things for good reasons. There aren't situations in which doing a bad thing is forgiven, either, if something good happens as a direct consequence. The Kinslaying at Alqualond? led the Noldor to Middle-Earth where they helped save humans from Morgoth's tyranny, and that was good, but it didn't ever even partially absolve them of their crimes. The doom of the Noldor was still upon them even after they'd suffered and fought to redeem themselves.

The higher powers also have no grey areas. You can change alignment, as it were, but you can't sit on the fence. Manw? is good. Morgoth is bad. Melian is good. Sauron is bad. Gandalf is good. Saruman is good, then he's corrupted, and becomes bad. Even though Eru himself admits that the tragedy Melkor introduced to Arda will only make its story more beautiful, Morgoth still has his feet cut off and gets chained and imprisoned for eternity. I'm not arguing that the Valar ought to have let him get on with what he was doing, of course.

In TES, it's never so clear-cut. The Aedra aren't good any more than the Daedra are bad. Both are necessary for balance. Good is not supposed to triumph over evil, any more than IS is supposed to triumph over IS NOT. That's the fundamental difference which I was trying to point out; not that Tolkien's "good" characters are never bad, but that it's always desirable for good to triumph.

[JR Cash]

Well he was a Professor of Anglo-Saxon who wrote LOTR (and its surrounding mythology) upwards of 70-ish years ago (Silmarillion was started in the 19-teens). Some datedness for modern readers is to be expected.

[Jessica Colville]

To add to which, Tolkien's worldview was much more Medieval than Modern (and I don't mean that in a disparaging way). Aside from guiding his black-and-white view of morality as noted above, you'll find this also influenced his style greatly. I think Tolkien was particularly influenced by the somewhat anachronistic and verbose Gawain-poet (whose works he translated [and translated very well--his translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Pearl are, in my opinion, the best and I've read several translations of both]).

[Annick Charron]

It's not the datedness of the prose (Heck, I'm in the process of reading - and loving - an 1850 novel entitled "AD 2000"). It's the fact the prose is so dang dry. I'm one of those individuals whose brain operates on sights and sounds, not detailed descriptions. Tolkein, by contrast, could spend paragraphs detailing the scene and detailing it well (Never take my criticism for the man's style and dismissal of his overall contribution to literature. Lord of the Rings is a masterpiece, no question.)...and my brain was suffocating on the details. All thought, no soul - ya know?

[Prisca Lacour]

Have to disagree with you. Tolkien's prose is in places quite dry, especially in The Fellowship of the Ring and the first quarter or so of The Two Towers, but there are passages that are more soulful than any other author I can think of. Now, if you want authors who are pure soul I highly recommend Ursula K. LeGuin or Sue Harrison. Nevertheless, Tolkien's description of Edoras in The Two Towers is magnificent, and my favorite soulful passage comes from Return of the King:

Never fails to bring a tear to my eye.

Not saying you have to like Tolkien's prose--I think it's something you either love or hate. I personally love it, but a lot of people hate it and I understand why. Just disagreeing with your statement that it lacks soul.