Abstract
A close comparison of Wagner’s Ring Cycle and the history of the One Ring in Tolkien’s legendarium which goes far beyond the usual shallow or dismissive comparison between the two. Here we see Tolkien, as he frequently did, absorbing the influence of an earlier author and responding in the form of a correction based on his sense that Wagner had, as Shippey put it, “got something very important not quite right” (Road 344).
