9 Things J.K. Rowling Blatantly Stole From LotR

It’s hard to write a modern fantasy story without drawing inspiration from J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. The trilogy shaped the genre so completely that almost everything published since carries some trace of Middle-earth. However, the line between paying homage and becoming derivative is thin, and J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter novels stray across it far too often. Hogwarts may not be a Middle-earth-style high-fantasy kingdom, but several of its most memorable ingredients feel far too familiar to anyone who’s read LotR.

Across the seven Harry Potter novels there are plenty of situations, characters, and worldbuilding details that Lord of the Rings readers feel like they know all too well. Creating a fantasy series with absolutely no resemblance to J.R.R. Tolkien’s work may be arguably impossible for any modern author, but the Wizarding World takes far too many liberties with how much it “borrows” from Middle-earth. True, these similarities aren’t outright plagiarism, but J.K. Rowling’s fantasy world is still much more recognizable than it should be.

9

Giant Spiders

Aragog Is Just A Friendlier Version Of Shelob

Sending young heroes into the territory of an enormous man-eating spider was a fear of many fantasy readers long before Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets thanks to Lord of the Rings. J.R.R. Tolkien’s Shelob turns a concealed passage into one of Middle-earth’s most horrifying locations, taking the focus from the wider war to an immediate struggle against an ancient and hungry arachnid of nightmarish proportions. J.K. Rowling’s Aragog gives Hogwarts its own equivalent, and swapping the mountains of Mordor for the Forbidden Forest doesn’t make the inspiration any less obvious.

True, there are differences in personality. Aragog is conversational and has a protective relationship with Hagrid that proves he’s capable of seeing mankind as more than a meal, while Shelob is a solitary predator and undeniably evil. Nevertheless, once Aragog permits his offspring to feed on Harry and Ron it becomes clear that J.K. Rowling is simply replicating the “heroes are about to be eaten by a giant spider” threat Tolkien tapped into with Shelob. Even the temporary shift away from the threat of the central villain feels familiar. For one terrifying stretch, surviving the local arachnid population becomes considerably more urgent than saving the world. It’s a memorable Chamber of Secrets moment, but one that wouldn’t exist without The Lord of the Rings.

8

The Wise Old Wizard Trope

Dumbledore And Gandalf May As Well Be The Same Person

When comparing the similarities between Harry Potter’s Dumbledore and The Lord of the Rings’ Gandalf, the long white beards are only the beginning. Both characters both combine immense magical authority with an unexpectedly approachable manner. They can be playful, infuriatingly indirect, and considerably more intimidating than their warmth initially suggests. Each recognizes the importance of an apparently unremarkable young person, then helps position that person against an enemy whose power makes a conventional victory seem impossible. Their greatest contribution is often understanding people rather than performing spectacular magic.

The similarities between Dumbledore and Gandalf are already glaring, but J.K. Rowling’s repurposing of Middle-earth’s Grey Wizard extends to their narrative function too. Both stories eventually remove their vulnerable heroes from the protection of their respective venerable sorcerers. Gandalf’s fall in Moria forces Frodo to continue without him, while Dumbledore’s death leaves Harry with an unfinished mission and deeply uncomfortable questions. Gandalf returns, whereas Dumbledore remains dead, but the narrative purpose overlaps: the mentor’s absence forces the mentee to confront evil with the proverbial training wheels off. While it’s true that Dumbledore’s mistakes and manipulations give J.K. Rowling’s version a distinct edge, the underlying arrangement feels far too similar to Gandalf.

7

Bumbling Trolls

Hogwarts’ Slow-Witted Trolls Resemble Tolkien’s Lumbering Monsters More Than Folklore’s Many Other Varieties

Image via Prime Video

Across the vast history of fairytales and folklore, trolls have appeared as everything from cunning supernatural neighbours to grotesque wilderness predators. J.R.R. didn’t invent trolls, so J.K. Rowling’s choice to model the trolls of the Wizarding World in a way that feels incredibly similar to the monstrous beasts that serve Sauron is suspicious to say the least. The mountain troll in Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone is an enormous, dangerous creature with limited intelligence and a club. The threat is from its physical power alone, while its intellectual limitations give it a clear weakness.

It’s hard to see past the fact that J.K. Rowling’s interpretation of trolls resemble the creatures J.R.R Tolkien cooked up for Middle-earth more than any of the dozens of other versions of the classic fairytale creature. True, her trolls don’t share every Tolkien characteristic, including vulnerability to sunlight and the fact that some trolls, like those in The Hobbit, can talk, but the recipe is still recognizable. A lumbering monster supplies immediate danger, then becomes faintly ridiculous once someone smarter intervenes. It’s exactly the same storytelling purpose the trolls in The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit exist to fill.

6

A Plucky Band Of Misfit Heroes

The Order Of The Phoenix Echoes The Fellowship As An Alliance Of Contrasting Personalities United Against An Overwhelming Evil

Victory in both Harry Potter and The Lord of the Rings depends on people who would usually be at odds thanks to conflicting personalities having to learn to work together. The Order of the Phoenix brings together witches and wizards whose only common ground is that they don’t want Voldemort to win and are loyal to Dumbledore. The Fellowship in The Lord of the Rings is similarly composed of members who, in any other circumstance, wouldn’t get along to say the least. The appeal of both groups for readers is that, on paper, neither should be able to cooperate well enough to save the day.

The Order of the Phoenix may be a resistance movement rather than a nine-member group with a single mission, but the specifics don’t disguise the fact that J.K. Rowling uses them to tap into a storytelling dynamic that Tolkien’s Fellowship turned into a fantasy staple. The way Rowling follows the recognizable pattern is textbook: turn the struggle against a Dark Lord into a collection of relationships readers can care about to make an enormous conflict feel personal. Rowling may relocate that dynamic from a traveling group of warriors to a clandestine resistance network, but the core appeal of the setup remains distinctly rooted in Tolkien’s work.

5

Trees With Personal Space Issues

The Whomping Willow Reworks Old Man Willow’s Transformation Of An Ordinary Tree Into A Dangerous Obstacle

An aggressive magical tree is already a specific concept, and making it a willow makes it even harder to ignore the fact that Hogwarts’ Whomping Willow feels plucked straight out of LotR. In The Fellowship of the Ring, Old Man Willow turns the Old Forest into a place where the landscape itself cannot be trusted. He lulls the hobbits towards sleep and tries to trap them in his trunk. The Whomping Willow may dispense with the subtleties and instead simply attack anything within the reach of its branches, but it’s still, essentially, a dangerous willow tree that creates problems for the heroes. The only notable differences are in their technique.

Old Man Willow’s menace in The Lord of the Rings involves enchantment and trickery, whereas Hogwarts’ Whomping Willow behaves more like an exceptionally aggressive animal. However, both make it clear to readers that, in their respective worlds, even the scenery can’t be trusted. J.K. Rowling may mix some comedy with genuine danger during encounters with the Whomping Willow, but this does remarkably little to disguise the resemblance to LotR’s own deadly tree.

4

The Dark Lord’s Most Terrifying Servants

Dementors Are A Little Too Similar To The Nazgûl In Appearance And Method

The similarities between the Nazgûl in Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter’s Dementors go beyond the fact that they both manifest and mysterious figures shrouded in dark robes. The Nazgûl make fear a weapon, spreading dread that can undermine resistance before physical combat begins. Dementors produce a comparable effect by draining happiness and forcing victims into despair. They’re both enemies whose arrival makes the world feel immediately less hopeful, regardless of whether anyone has actually been touched.

To be fair to J.K. Rowling, there are some notable differences. Rowling gives the Harry Potter creatures their own horrific mechanism through the soul-destroying Dementor’s Kiss and has them float rather than riding on horseback or flying fell beasts, but the overlap between the two is still too great to overlook. They’re both threats that attack the hero’s capacity to feel hope. Tolkien’s terrifying servants may use swords rather than literally sucking the souls from their victims, but outside this the Dementors are essentially the Nazgûl of the Wizarding World.

3

An Evil Wizard Having A Sniveling Henchman

Wormtail And Wormtongue Are Far Too Similar In More Than Just Name

One of the most blatant LotR-inspired characters in Harry Potter is Peter Pettigrew, the sniveling servant of Voldemort, who comes across as a repackaged version of Saruman’s own cowardly henchman Gríma Wormtongue. The fact that Peter Pettigrew’s nickname is “Wormtail” means that it’s not a hard one to spot, too. Both Wormtail and Wormtongue survive by offering loyalty to dark wizards in exchange for the protection they believe evil’s power can provide. Neither has even a fraction of the power of the villain he serves, and both make themselves useful by their willingness to perform degrading work and sell out their former friends.

Gríma Wormtongue wrote the blueprint for pathetic villains who make evil look less like an ideological commitment and more like a succession of cowardly personal decisions. It’s a trail that Peter Pettigrew later followed, and did so far too closely for readers to ignore the similarities. The endings of their character arcs may be very different thanks to Wormtongue ultimately murdering Saruman, but both are cowardly servants of dark wizards who will do anything for the promise of security, including sacrificing their dignity. J.K. Rowling may have changed the outcome, but the sniveling henchman archetype remains unmistakably familiar.

2

Mirrors That Reveal Hidden Truths

The Mirror of Erised And Galadriel’s Mirror Have The Same Narrative Purpose

The arrival of a magical mirror that exposes the desires of anyone gazing in is often celebrated as one of the most iconic moments in Harry Potter and The Philosopher’s Stone. However, decades before The Mirror of Erised showed Harry the family he desperately wants, LotR’s Galadriel offered a very similar experience to Frodo with her own mirror in Lothlórien. In both cases, gazing into the mirror becomes a test of character. It’s a simple concept, but is a great way to build narrative tension thanks to both Frodo and Harry doubting themselves and their goals following the encounter. It’s a trick the Harry Potter books later use again with the Pensieve.

True, the mechanisms are different. Galadriel’s Mirror in The Lord of the Rings is a basin of water showing things from the past, present, and possible future. The Mirror of Erised displays the viewer’s deepest desire, while the Pensieve allows Harry to travel into Dumbledore’s memories. In broad terms, though, all three are mysterious reflective objects that give the heroes cryptic visions whose true impact and meaning doesn’t become apparent until much later. They’re all used as narrative tools to test the hero’s resolve, and it’s hard to argue that Galadriel’s Mirror doesn’t feel like a precursor to both the Mirror of Erised and Pensieve in Harry Potter.

1

Artifacts Bound To A Dark Lord’s Soul

Voldemort Having Multiple Horcruxes Doesn’t Change That They Borrow The Central Idea Of The One Ring

The most indefensible element of The Lord of the Rings that J.K. Rowling repurposed for the Harry Potter novels is the One Ring, which it’s hard to deny is the basis for Voldemort’s Horcruxes. Just like in LotR, defeating the central villain in Harry Potter requires more than destroying his physical body. Sauron can’t die while the One Ring exists, and Voldemort will always come back unless the Horcruxes are destroyed. While the fact that there are seven Horcruxes turns the final struggle into a search-and-destroy mission rather than a quest to eliminate a single object, the fact that in both stories the Dark Lord can’t die unless a magical object/objects are dealt with is impossible to overlook.

Once again, J.K. Rowling has tweaked a few specifics rather than directly lifting J.R.R. Tolkien’s creation from the pages of LotR. The Ring contains a portion of Sauron’s power rather than a severed soul fragment created through murder, for example. Narratively, however, they fill the same function. The resemblance is especially clear with Salazar Slytherin’s locket. Anyone carrying it is besieged by feelings of resentment and despair, just like the One Ring. Add the remote wilderness journey to destroy the Horcruxes and a villain whose survival depends on their safety, and the quest to defeat the central villain in Harry Potter starts to feel like Frodo’s journey to Mordor but with a different aesthetic.

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  Cast

  Daniel Radcliffe, Emma Watson, Rupert Grint, Tom Felton, Alan Rickman, Matthew Lewis, Bonnie Wright, Evanna Lynch, Maggie Smith, Michael Gambon, Richard Harris, Ralph Fiennes, Helena Bonham Carter, Alfred Enoch, Harry Melling, Gary Oldman, Robert Pattinson, Warwick Davis, Oliver Phelps, James Phelps, David Bradley, David Thewlis, Katie Leung, Jason Isaacs, Imelda Staunton, David Tennant, Jamie Campbell Bower, Timothy Spall, Robbie Coltrane, Eddie Redmayne, Jude Law, Katherine Waterston, Ezra Miller, Dan Fogler, Alison Sudol, Johnny Depp, Mads Mikkelsen

  First TV Show

  Harry Potter

  Character(s)

  Harry Potter, Hermione Granger, Ron Weasley, Dumbledore, Minerva McGonagall, Rubeus Hagrid, Dobby the House Elf, Draco Malfoy, Sirius Black, Ginny Weasley, Voldemort

  Harry Potter is a multimedia franchise about an orphaned boy who enrolls at Hogwarts School of Wizardry, where he learns the truth about himself, his family, and the terrible evil that haunts the magical world. Adapted from the novels, Harry Potter is an eight-episode film saga that follows the journey of Harry Potter and his friends, Hermoine Granger and Ron Weasley, as they navigate the tricky world of growing up, school life, and magic. Starting from year one and moving to their seventh year, the films chronicle the students’ time at Hogwarts while unfurling a sinister plot that centers around the unsuspecting Harry. With the return of the dark wizard, Voldemort, the students and professors at Hogwarts will fight to carry on as the world around them may change forever. Harry Potter has expanded beyond the world of its films and novels with several video games, a spin-off film series titled Fantastic Beasts, and even attractions at Universal Studios.

  
  

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  Cast

  Norman Bird, Anthony Daniels, Elijah Wood, Ian McKellen, Liv Tyler, Viggo Mortensen, Sean Astin, Cate Blanchett, John Rhys-Davies, Billy Boyd, Dominic Monaghan, Orlando Bloom, Christopher Lee, Hugo Weaving, Sean Bean, Ian Holm, Andy Serkis, Brad Dourif, Karl Urban, Martin Freeman, Richard Armitage, James Nesbitt, Ken Stott, Benedict Cumberbatch, Evangeline Lilly, Lee Pace, Luke Evans, Morfydd Clark, Mike Wood, Ismael Cruz Cordova, Charlie Vickers, Markella Kavenagh, Megan Richards, Sara Zwangobani, Daniel Weyman, Cynthia Addai-Robinson, Lenny Henry, Brian Cox, Shaun Dooley, Miranda Otto, Bilal Hasna, Benjamin Wainwright, Luke Pasqualino, Christopher Guard, William Squire, Michael Scholes, John Hurt

  Created by

  J.R.R. Tolkien

  Movie(s)

  The Lord of the Rings (1978), The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug, The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies, The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim

  Character(s)

  Frodo Baggins, Gandalf, Legolas, Boromir, Sauron, Gollum, Samwise Gamgee, Pippin Took, Celeborn, Aragorn, Galadriel, Bilbo Baggins, Saruman, Aldor, Wormtongue, Thorin Oakenshield, Balin Dwalin, Bifur, Bofur, Bombur, Fili, Kili, Oin, Gloin, Nori, Dori, Ori, Tauriel, King Thranduil, Smaug, Radagast, Arondir, Nori Brandyfoot, Poppy Proudfellow, Marigold Brandyfoot, Queen Regent Míriel, Sadoc Burrows

  The Lord of the Rings is a multimedia franchise consisting of several movies and a TV show released by Amazon titled The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power. The franchise is based on J.R.R. Tolkien’s book series that began in 1954 with The Fellowship of the Ring. The Lord of the Rings saw mainstream popularity with Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit trilogies.