Q: Where did J.R.R. Tolkien Find His Ideas for Writing?
ANSWER: There is no short, simple answer to the question concerning where J.R.R. Tolkien got his ideas for writing from, for he took them from many sources of inspiration. Some of his stories or characters were simply inspired by questions or requests from his children. The Ents, for example, while often associated with Tolkien’s dislike of a famous Shakespearean passage also owe something to an anecdote concerning a tree that Tolkien’s neighbor cut down. One of Tolkien’s sons (I think it was Michael) asked his father to do something for the trees in The Lord of the Rings; hence, the Ents and Huorns took on a somewhat vengeful and protective nature, at least around characters bearing axes.
There are television documentaries and popular books that will tell you J.R.R. Tolkien got his ideas from Norse mythology, Celtic folklore, and old Germanic or Icelandic stories. While it is true he did borrow ideas from these sources, he also attributed many of his ideas to Finnish, Egyptian, Greek, and other sources. Through careful study many scholars have suggested there were other sources as well, some from Middle English stories and poems, some from modern history, some from other European mythologies and languages (such as Slavic), and so forth.
I think it would be more accurate and fair to say that J.R.R. Tolkien borrowed many ideas from European mythologies, folklore, and history and from the development of Europe’s language families as it was understood in his day. He also drew upon personal experiences.
It is really impossible to say much more than that without starting to write a multi-book length discourse on Tolkien’s acknowledged, inferred, and possible sources of inspiration. Dozens of Tolkien scholars have been working hard to document the sources (on and off) for decades. I don’t think their work is yet near finished. For example, I only learned about the possible Slavic influences within the past few years, whereas I learned about the Finnish influences in the 1990s, and I had learned about his Norse and Germanic influences in the 1970s.
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