Letters to the Editor
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Tolkien didn't borrow from Wagner...
...so much as he did from Wagner's own medieval source, the Nibelungenlied, with which he had been familiar since boyhood. And the Old Norse Eddas. And the Kalevala. And Beowulf...there is certainly a syncretic element to his work, but some of the themes are common enough in Germanic and Scandinavian literature of the Middle Ages that even "borrow" is a strong word for what he did, unless one also "borrows" oxygen from the air.