One is Lord of the Rings, the other is Hindu. Both have people that like them and don't like them too.
How does both compare?
One is Lord of the Rings, the other is Hindu. Both have people that like them and don't like them too.
Wut
Well, Tolkien's deliberate inspirations were strictly North-Western European (Norse, Anglo-Saxon, Finnish, Celtic), classical Greco-Roman, and his own deep Catholic faith, and if you do see similarities between *The Lord of the Rings* and say Hindu epics like the *Ramayana* or *Mahabharata*, then that is obviously Proto-Indo-European shared roots, or even broader universal mythic archetypes. Certain motifs overlap, for sure: age of decline, sacred trees, spiritual hierarchies, even divine guides as Istari are, but the core philosophy, like the nature of evil, morality, and stuff like death and the afterlife, vastly different!!
Hindu, Greek and Norse mythologies depict a race of divine beings who war with gigantic monstrous beings led by a god or godlike monster for mastery of the Earth, not unlike Morgoth and his balrogs, trolls and other monsters.
Pretty much not at all. Obviously Hindu myths like the Mahabharata do have themes in common with Lord of the Rings, such as friendship, good vs evil, the role of fate etc. but those are fairly universal themes. I don't think Tolkien was particularly inspired by Hindu mythology. Just wasn't really his field.
One is a mythology invented by one man over the period of one lifetime, informed mainly by Norse mythology and his own Christian religion, primarily for his own interests. The other is a complex web of interwoven mythologies and religions invented by countless people, serparated by thousands of years and thousands of miles, for purposes just as diverse. They did both spawn a lot of fanfiction though.
I'd love to learn that Tolkien's "blue wizards" were inspired by eastern traditions