10 Tales That Inspired Tolkien

Long before The Hobbit tiptoed into the Shire or the Fellowship marched out of Rivendell,
J.R.R. Tolkien was a kid (and later, a professor) with his nose buried in other people’s stories.
The roots of Middle-earth run deep: into Victorian adventure novels, fairy tales, children’s fantasy,
and ancient epics. If you’ve ever wondered what books and tales helped inspire Tolkien’s legendarium,
this tour of ten key works is your reading list into the past.

These are the tales that shaped Tolkien’s imagination, nudged him toward hobbits, dragons, cursed rings,
and shining halls, and ultimately helped give us the fantasy genre as we know it today.

How Old Tales Became the Seeds of Middle-earth

Tolkien was, first and last, a reader. He was also a philologist, which basically means
“that professor who takes languages and old texts way too seriously” in the best possible way.
He read widely in medieval literature, children’s stories, Victorian fantasy, and
early science-fantasy. From those shelves came images that echo through
The Lord of the Rings: long halls lit with golden light, gloomy marshes and deadly bogs,
dragons sprawled on treasure hoards, and little folk who love food, comfort, and second breakfast.

The ten tales below aren’t the only things that inspired Tolkien, but they’re a wonderfully concrete
way to see how “books that inspired Tolkien” gradually turned into books that inspired pretty much
everyone else.

1. The Roots of the Mountains – William Morris

If Middle-earth had a Victorian grand-uncle, it would probably be William Morris. His romance
The Roots of the Mountains follows the people of a northern valley, the Burgdalers, as they
defend their homeland from darker, more savage foes. The story is packed with archaic language,
mead-halls, warbands, and detailed descriptions of landscape and daily life.

Scholars have pointed out how Morris’s mix of archaic diction, rugged countryside, and
clash between free folk and “dusky” invaders anticipates Tolkien’s Rohirrim, their hall at Meduseld,
and even the atmosphere of the Dead Marshes and borderlands of Mordor. Tolkien explicitly acknowledged
that certain gloomy landscapes in The Lord of the Rings owed more to Morris than to his own war
experience. If you’ve ever felt that Rohan had an almost “older than England” storybook quality,
you’re hearing Morris echoing behind Tolkien’s words.

2. Beowulf

Tolkien didn’t just read Beowulf; he practically dragged the poem into the modern era.
His famous lecture “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics” argued that the dragon and other monsters
weren’t just background noise but the heart of the poem. That attitude that monsters matter,
and that a story about courage and mortality needs them sits right at the core of Middle-earth.

The dragon in Beowulf is an obvious ancestor of Smaug: ancient, gold-obsessed,
and terrifying when disturbed. The poem’s contrast between fragile human communities
and overwhelming darkness also shows up in places like Rohan and Gondor,
where small bands of people stand against enemies far beyond them. Even the sense of a long-ago heroic
age fading into legend feels very “Tolkien.” Read Beowulf and then reread the ride of the Rohirrim
it’s like hearing the same music in a different key.

3. “The Story of Sigurd” – Andrew Lang (from The Red Fairy Book)

Tolkien loved Andrew Lang’s colored fairy books as a child, and “The Story of Sigurd” was
one of his absolute favorites. It’s a retelling of the Norse Volsung material:
Sigurd reforges a broken sword, slays the dragon Fafnir, and gets tangled in curses and tragic love.

You don’t have to squint hard to see the connections. A shattered sword remade into a kingly weapon?
That’s Aragorn’s Narsil/Andúril. A dragon lying on treasure, suspicious of everyone? Smaug is practically
Fafnir’s literary grandson. Tolkien even admitted that Fafnir was a more satisfying dragon than the one
in Beowulf and named Fafnir as a direct source for Smaug’s personality. If you want to understand
the darker, more tragic flavor of some First Age stories in The Silmarillion, Sigurd’s doomed
heroism is a good place to start.

4. The Book of Dragons – E. Nesbit

Not everything that inspired Tolkien is grim or high tragedy. E. Nesbit, queen of late Victorian
children’s fantasy, wrote The Book of Dragons, a collection of playful dragon stories that
mix humor with danger. There’s evidence Tolkien may have read these tales as a child: he once recalled
writing a story about a “green great dragon,” which his mother teasingly insisted should be a
“great green dragon.” Nesbit’s dragons are often green, a little ridiculous, and surprisingly personable.

That blend of danger and comedy feels very much like Smaug sparring verbally with Bilbo,
or Chrysophylax the dragon in Tolkien’s own Farmer Giles of Ham. Nesbit’s stories showed that
dragons could be both threatening and funny without losing their mythic punch a balance Tolkien would
exploit brilliantly.

5. The Golden Key and Other Tales – George MacDonald

George MacDonald is the quiet godfather of a lot of modern fantasy, and Tolkien was well aware of him.
He read MacDonald’s stories, including The Golden Key and the “Curdie” books, from an early age.
He later had mixed feelings about the writing style, but he never quite shook the images.

MacDonald’s works are full of ancient, mysterious women, strange journeys, and moral tests.
One description of an ageless, wise woman with long, pale hair and unlined face has often been compared
to Galadriel’s first appearance in Lothlórien. The goblins and nastier creatures in MacDonald’s children’s
books helped normalize the idea of fairy-tale beings as a serious part of a story’s moral landscape,
not just background decoration. Even when Tolkien argued with MacDonald in his head, he was arguing as
a fellow maker of myth.

6. “Puss-Cat Mew” – E.H. Knatchbull-Hugessen

This may be the most obscure item on the list, but it stuck with Tolkien for decades. He remembered being
read from a tattered old children’s collection that contained “Puss-Cat Mew,” a story involving a gloomy
forest, ogres, dwarfs, and fairies, plus an illustration of an ogre disguised as a tree.

If that sounds suspiciously like the Old Forest, Mirkwood, Fangorn, and the Ents rolled into one,
you’re not alone. Scholars of Tolkien’s work have drawn lines from this half-forgotten story to his own
living trees and haunted woods. Tolkien sometimes downplayed the influence of pictures on his imagination,
but an ogre-tree that stayed with him from childhood is hard to dismiss. Middle-earth’s forests feel
dangerous and alive in part because, in Tolkien’s mind, they always had the potential to stand up and walk.

7. The Marvellous Land of Snergs – E.A. Wyke-Smith

If hobbits had cousins in another book, they’d be the Snergs. Wyke-Smith’s children’s fantasy follows
short, sturdy folk who love feasts, comfort, and good company, living in a land filled with trolls,
dragons, and various menaces. Tolkien read it to his own children and later said that the “Snerg-element”
and the character Gorbo especially delighted him.

The parallels are hard to miss: small, convivial people with humorous names; hearty meals; and journeys
through dangerous forests and caves. Tolkien himself admitted that the book was probably an unconscious
“source-book” for hobbits. The Shire feels like a more polished, linguistically grounded evolution of the
Snergs’ world less slapstick, more history, but still full of tea, cakes, and low doorways.

8. The Adventure Novels of H. Rider Haggard

Before there was Indiana Jones, there was H. Rider Haggard. His novels like
King Solomon’s Mines and She were wildly popular in the late 19th century,
and Tolkien read them with enthusiasm. Haggard specialized in “lost worlds”: hidden kingdoms,
ancient treasures, and perilous underground realms.

It isn’t hard to see why a young Tolkien enjoyed them. Treasure maps, hazardous journeys through
caverns, and the discovery of ancient civilizations all feed directly into The Hobbit and parts
of The Lord of the Rings. While Tolkien later built much more complex histories and languages
than Haggard ever attempted, that basic thrill of exploration strangers descending into old, dark places
in search of something powerful owes a clear debt to these Victorian adventure tales.

9. The Night Land – William Hope Hodgson

The Night Land is one of those books that many fantasy fans have heard of but few have actually
finished. C.S. Lewis praised its “unforgettable sombre splendor” while also complaining about its
sometimes clunky pseudo-archaic prose. Tolkien may or may not have read Hodgson directly,
but the overlap in mood is striking.

The novel imagines a future Earth swallowed by darkness, where human survivors huddle in a giant pyramid
fortress while indescribable things lurk in the night outside. The sense of oppressive darkness,
strange watchful shapes in the distance, and a small lighted refuge under siege feels very close to
places like Mordor’s borderlands or the dread around Minas Morgul. Even if Tolkien only encountered
Hodgson second-hand through friends like Lewis, that picture of “light in a sea of darkness”
clearly harmonized with his own myth-making instincts.

10. The Book of Wonder – Lord Dunsany

Lord Dunsany’s The Book of Wonder is a jewel box of short, lushly imaginative weird tales,
including “Chu-bu and Sheemish” and “The Hoard of the Gibbelins.” Tolkien knew these stories,
quoted them, and even joked that if he ever used nonsense-sounding names like “Boo-hoo,”
he’d be thinking of Dunsany’s gods.

Dunsany’s influence isn’t just in names. “The Hoard of the Gibbelins,” with its monstrous hoarders of
treasure in a distant stronghold, looks like a prototype for Tolkien’s poem “The Mewlips,”
where creeps hide in a forgotten place “beyond the Merlock Mountains.” Dunsany showed how to create
a sense of mythic distance with just a few evocative details and an offhand map reference
a trick Tolkien refined and then scaled up to an entire world.

Beyond These Ten: The Deeper Roots

Around and beneath all these books lie the bigger foundations Tolkien himself often named:
Norse sagas, Finnish Kalevala, medieval romances, Biblical and Christian themes,
and the landscapes of his own childhood. But looking at these ten specific tales has a special charm.
They’re places where you can watch the gears turning where a single dragon, goblin, or strange map
entry trails a faint line forward into the Shire, Gondolin, or the Sammath Naur.

Why These Tales Still Matter to Fantasy Readers

For modern readers, these stories do two things. First, they let you see Tolkien as a participant in a
larger conversation, not a lone wizard writing in a tower. He borrowed, argued with, and reimagined
what he’d read. Second, they show how fantasy itself evolves. Without Morris’s pastoral epics,
Haggard’s pulp adventures, Dunsany’s jeweled prose, or MacDonald’s moral fairy tales,
we might not have had Middle-earth and without Middle-earth, today’s sprawling fantasy shelves
would look very different.

Reading the tales that inspired Tolkien isn’t about catching him in the act of copying.
It’s about watching how a great imagination composts everything it’s ever loved,
turning old stories into new myth.

Living the Magic: Experiences With the Tales That Inspired Tolkien

So what does it actually feel like to read these tales now, as a twenty-first–century Tolkien fan?
In a word: strange. In two words: strangely familiar. You keep bumping into prototypes of things you
already love, like recognizing family traits in old photographs.

Take The Marvellous Land of Snergs. If you pick it up after years of rereading
The Hobbit, there’s this delightful moment of cognitive dissonance when Gorbo lumbers onto the
page. He isn’t a hobbit, exactly, but his blend of clumsiness, loyalty, and appetite feels like
Bilbo’s chaotic cousin. The setting is looser and more anarchic than the carefully mapped Shire,
but the atmosphere of “small folk in big trouble” is instantly recognizable. It’s like hearing an early
demo of a song you only knew from the polished studio album.

Or consider reading Beowulf after a lifetime of watching Peter Jackson’s films.
The language, even in translation, is stark and formal, but the emotional beats are familiar:
a doomed king, a dragon sitting on gold it can’t spend, a hero who goes to his death because
someone has to try. The poem’s tight focus makes Tolkien’s sprawling legendarium look almost
like a long, affectionate reply: “Yes, but what if we followed the descendants,
and the people in the next kingdom over, and the elves they once met, and the age before that…?”

Diving into Dunsany’s The Book of Wonder is a different experience entirely.
The stories are short, dreamlike, and just a bit slippery. You might read “The Hoard of the Gibbelins”
in ten minutes and spend the next hour feeling odd. The names of places the Gibbelins, the Merrow Downs,
the Border of the World carry the same “map-on-the-endpapers” vibe that Tolkien later made famous.
You start to notice how a single throwaway line about “a road that runs beyond the fields we know”
can open a mental door you didn’t realize was there. Once you’ve seen Dunsany do it with a paragraph,
the way Tolkien does it with entire appendices makes even more sense.

H. Rider Haggard’s adventure novels offer another flavor: pure pulp energy.
Reading King Solomon’s Mines after The Hobbit is like watching an older,
more chaotic ancestor of Bilbo’s journey. There’s the map, the expedition into dangerous territory,
the sense that the modern gentlemen are in way over their heads. Tolkien stripped away the colonial
attitudes and simplistic moral framing but kept the pleasures of exploration, ancient ruins,
and treasure that comes at a high price.

Then there’s the emotional whiplash of moving from children’s fantasy into something like
The Night Land. Hodgson’s prose can feel dense, but the atmosphere is pure, distilled dread:
isolated humans, dark plains full of watching things, and a fortress of light surrounded by
a sea of shadow. If you’ve ever felt a chill reading about Frodo and Sam crossing the
plains of Gorgoroth or looking up at the red glare of Mount Doom, you’ll recognize
that emotional tone. It’s a reminder that fantasy isn’t just escapism; it’s also about confronting
the things that scare us most.

Perhaps the most surprising experience of all, though, is realizing how much these older works
reward slow reading. Tolkien built his world out of details place names, genealogies,
snippets of poetry and the books he loved trained him for that. When you let Morris’s
long descriptions of halls and hills wash over you, or pause to savor the rhythm of
an Old English line in Beowulf, you’re stepping into the same reading posture Tolkien
himself adopted. You’re not just racing to the plot twist; you’re living in the language.

For devoted Tolkien fans, building a “Tolkien inspiration shelf” can become a long-term project.
Maybe you start with something accessible, like Nesbit or MacDonald, then move on to
The Marvellous Land of Snergs or Haggard, and finally tackle Beowulf or
The Night Land when you’re ready for something heavier. Along the way, you’ll notice
your next reread of The Lord of the Rings feels different. Names that once passed you by
now sound like deliberate echoes; certain scenes feel like Tolkien playfully rearranging
very old furniture.

In the end, reading the tales that inspired Tolkien is a bit like walking the paths behind the Shire,
up into the old hills where the hobbits’ ancestors once roamed. The stories are rougher,
stranger, and sometimes harder going than a comfortable trip to Bag End.
But they’re part of the same landscape and once you’ve walked them, Middle-earth feels
even bigger, older, and more alive.