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Silvered-glass
Nargothrond
Dec 13 2025, 1:53pm
Post #1 of 11
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Mordor and the Night Land / The One Ring and the Electric Circle / Tolkien and William Hope Hodgson
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1. Introduction
My theory is that Tolkien was greatly influenced by the Irish author William Hope Hodgson's far-future novel The Night Land (1912) (later republished in the Fantasy Masterworks series). This influence is specifically found in The Lords of the Rings. The similarities in the earlier Tolkien material are few and vague, the type to be easily due to coincidence. The similarities in The Lord of the Rings are a different thing entirely and point to a creative breakthrough inspired by a new source of inspiration that had a profound effect on the direction of the story.
The Night Land is a novel that is particularly notable for its worldbuilding, and I think that aspect would have appealed to Tolkien, along with the heroic quest narrative.
Connecting The Lord of the Rings and The Night Land to my knowledge has never been done before. Although William Hope Hodgson is still remembered today in the horror circles especially for his more approachable other novel The House on the Borderland (an influence to Lovecraft), The Night Land is not so widely-known. Adding to the issue is that the far-future premise of The Night Land does not naturally give the impression that the story could turn out to be anything like Tolkien's works. This should explain how The Night Land could have entirely plausibly slipped through the net in Tolkien research.
(I think it is possible that Tolkien first read The Night Land in his youth, not too long after the original publication of the novel, explaining how the vague Silmarillion connections are concentrated in the very early material, being found mainly in The Fall of Gondolin and Beren and Lúthien. Under this scenario the influence on The Lord of the Rings would come from a mature re-read of an old favorite. I will however refrain from arguing for this possibility because of the low quality of evidence and concentrate on The Lord of the Rings.)
I think direct The Night Land influence, integrated into Tolkien's existing world, is at its most noticeable in the Mordor segments, as well as in Minas Tirith in relation to Mordor. These are the parts that are the hardest to deny, and I suggest that people with knee-jerk reactions about Tolkien having been influenced by relatively modern authors consider these parts carefully. Of particular note also is the possibility that Tolkien got the idea for mithril from The Night Land.
On the other hand, the One Ring possibly having been inspired by The Night Land is a radical theory that I expect will not be so easy to accept. Because of this, demonstrating a pattern of influence is very important.
In recognition that probably not many people reading this are familiar with The Night Land, I decided to try to be somewhat sparing with the spoilers. Some spoilers are necessary for discussion, but I don't want to give out the entire plot. I will be giving unredacted spoilers for the worldbuilding lore dump in Chapter 2, also spoil much of the other early worldbuilding content, be somewhat cautious about the course of the main plot (even if the chapter titles gathered together in a table of contents spoil way too much for people interested in trying out the novel), and avoid talking about the ending beyond the barest hints even when spoiling everything would strongly support my point. (In case there is interest, I can put illuminating ending spoilers in a different post.)
The Night Land is freely available on the Internet thanks to public domain (but is a long read):
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Night_Land
The real location appears in Chapter 2.
2. Points of Comparison
2.1 Mordor and Minas Tirith
Imagine a perpetually dark land lit by frequent volcanism and the lights of a great fortress tower that remain visible a for a long distance over the dreary landscape in which almost nothing grows. This land is populated by monsters, some of them humanoid, some of them capable of heavy industry, and ruled by nebulous but clearly intelligent and purposeful powers of evil. This description could be about either Mordor or the Night Land.
Against these powers of evil are the Great Redoubt and Minas Tirith, two towering, more or less pyramidical, fortress cities perpetually on the defensive and headed not by a king but by a scholar who has spent many years gazing at the immense might of the enemy. The two cities, in addition to their heavily defensive overall designs both have unbreakable outer protection, which is a relatively normal-looking (if unbreakable) curtain wall in the case of Minas Tirith while the Great Redoubt's scientific Electric Circle stops the monsters in a manner similar to a magic circle.
Both cities also have ancient magical or semi-magical technology that allows long-distance communication between minds, but this technology is not immune to interference and attempts at psychological manipulation from evil forces to induce rash actions and despair. (In a major difference, this technology is a state secret in Minas Tirith but public knowledge in the Great Redoubt.) There are also special ways to get visual information from afar.
Opposite the above cities are the House of Silence and Minas Morgul, which a long time ago were taken over by evil forces and became places of fear, shining in the darkness and surrounded by eerie mystery, with a reputation as places of no return. Both locations are shown to be able to exert a malign supernatural influence on those who get too close to the mighty walls and give the spiritual impression of something watching from the inside. The House of Silence is as perpetually silent as its name indicates, and Minas Morgul is also shown to operate without sound except for the very loud war signal that contrasts with the absence of sound.
2.2 Moria, Dwarf Culture, Mithril
Another area for unexpected influence from The Night Land is Moria. This includes general Dwarf culture and most notably mithril.
The Night Land has its version of the post-fall Moria, but the closest equivalents to the Moria chapters are outdoors.
As for the pre-fall Moria, there is the Great Redoubt. Rather than being a mountain-sized metal pyramid like the Great Redoubt, Tolkien's Moria is built inside a natural mountain range, but the two places are very similar in their closed arcology natures. We know more about the society of the Great Redoubt than about the home-life of the Dwarves, but based on this limited information, the societies appear to function along surprisingly similar lines. This may sound excessively speculative, but it is notable how smoothly the parallels work out.
The Great Redoubt's vast underground fields lit with artificial light may represent Tolkien's intended solution to how the Dwarves of Moria supported their population, even under siege conditions when no food could be imported from outside. According to Gimli, the inside of Moria used to be lit brightly, and that would be easy to explain with the Dwarves of Moria having had some form of artificial lighting, possibly involving electricity if not outright magic.
The people of the Great Redoubt also possess knowledge of a very strong, light, and enduring gray metal which is never named but which appears to have properties close to to unpolished mithril, "mith" in "mithril" even meaning gray. The gray metal is a massive advantage to the people of the Great Redoubt like mithril was to the Dwarves of Moria in a different way.
In the Great Redoubt both men and women are trained in armed combat, but women are strictly prohibited from leaving the safety of the fortress city. This is similar to the Dwarf women also staying at home to the point that people started doubting about the existence of Dwarf women.
A quirk in the writing style of The Night Land is how the main character avoids revealing his own name and uses very few proper names overall, instead preferring noun phrases that sometimes may vary for the same referent. For example, the Great Redoubt is also called the Last Redoubt, the Great Pyramid, the Mighty Pyramid, Mine Great Home, and other similar phrases. This is reminiscent of how Tolkien's Dwarves hide their true names and language from outsiders. The people of the Great Redoubt also appear to have cultural ideas along the same lines, although the story does not elaborate on that and only has the main character make a small mention about having been "so taught to wisdom" in one scene without really explaining.
Importantly, even though The Hobbit has a great focus on Dwarves, the connections to The Night Land are not in evidence. The Hobbit gives no indication that Thorin's real name might be something else, Bilbo's mail coat being mithril is a retcon of the "silvered steel" of the original published version, and so on.
It may be surprising to realize that mithril does not appear in Tolkien at all before the writing of The Lord of the Rings. The concept of mithril is very strongly associated with Tolkien, but the timeline is consistent with the idea that the inspiration for mithril comes from The Night Land. Tolkien's contribution was giving the metal its Elvish name and making his version extra-shiny.
Incidentally, it is unclear if the main character of The Night Land, who is also its first-person narrator, is really a human, as we understand the term, or just humanoid in general shape. He does not describe his own physical appearance beyond his equipment. He finds himself fighting giants a lot, so he might himself be short rather than everyone else being tall. He is remarkably hardy and can journey long distances with minimal rest despite having spent all his life indoors. There is also no mention of him shaving even though he gives a detailed account of his daily routine on his travels. Tolkien could easily have noticed these issues and made a connection to his own Dwarves.
2.3 The Monsters
The Night Land is populated by many different types of humanoid and non-humanoid monsters. Before writing The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien had already invented a variety of monsters of his own, but I think he picked up some new ideas from The Night Land to bolster his roster and to give some more depth to his existing creatures.
The Night Land has multiple different kinds of corrupted humanoid monsters. Several of the types are primitive and brutish. Notably, the dull-witted but strong, tough, and quick Humped Men are connected to Tolkien's Trolls through the use of the rare adjective "lumpish". The Humped Men are very much unlike the three talkative Trolls in The Hobbit though, the connection being really to the original proto-Trolls mentioned in the Appendices. The concept of the Dark Lord improving the Trolls and making them more intelligent first appears in The Lord of the Rings.
Other humanoid monsters in the Night Land are intelligent and capable of tunneling and industrial production like Tolkien's Orcs. The lights of this industry can be seen from far away in the dark Night Land. Mordor also has much industry. In The Hobbit, the goblins of the Misty Mountains display clever engineering skills, but the Orcs engaging in heavy industry starts in The Lord of the Rings.
It is also easy to compare the mysterious, shrouded Silent Ones and the Nazgûl, even if the beings do not play similar roles in the story and the Silent Ones have no mounts. Notably, the killing methods of the Silent Ones, capable of causing to someone to die after returning to safety from a condition described in the story as "his heart was frozen", show a possible inspiration for Frodo's Morgul-wound, which would have killed him once the embedded shard reached his heart.
Among the many non-humanoid monsters, the horse-sized Night Hounds edge in their story role towards the Nazgûl territory. (Monstrous canines are common in fiction and also appear early in Tolkien stories, so I think a connection to the Wargs cannot be justified.) There is also a lurking sand spider thing that is a possible inspiration for the Watcher in the Water. Cirith Ungol might perhaps be compared to the gorge with the slugs combined with the encounter with the Tree, though I may be reaching here overmuch. Web-weaving spiders of darkness are one of Tolkien's older ideas and have no real counterpart in the Night Land.
The silent and colossal Watchers of the Night Land are much akin to Mordor's smaller Silent Watchers. The watchful Eye in Barad-dûr is also comparable to the Night Land's Watchers and is an an example that is more on a level with them in emotional resonance.
The unfathomable Powers of Evil of the Night Land function narratively much like the distant Sauron in The Lord of the Rings.
On the other side of the coin, the Night Land also has the extremely mysterious Other Powers that can sometimes intervene to save people.
2.4 The Quest
Both The Lord of the Rings and The Night Land have at their core a stealth mission across wilderness and hostile land, past many dangers. In contrast to Frodo and Sam, the unnamed main character of The Night Land is a capable warrior more like Aragorn or Boromir than Frodo, but nevertheless the dangers of the Land are such that the hero has to resort to careful sneaking to survive.
A notable detail in the quest is that while the concentrated food tablets the main character brings with him from the Great Redoubt are not filling, subsisting solely on them has spiritual benefits:
Yet, I doubt not but that it did keep my soul sweet and wholesome and no useful thing to the Powers of Evil of the Land.
Subsisting on lembas is also said to have an effect on the spirit.
The ending of The Night Land also has very definite similarities to how Frodo and Sam's quest goes, but I don't want to give spoilers that detailed.
2.5 The Romance
The Night Land has a large element of romance. Perhaps unexpectedly, this turns out contain another point of connection to Tolkien.
And much I questioned her, and presently to my sorrow; for it seemed that her name was not truly Mirdath; but Naani; neither had she known my name; but that in the library of that place where she abode, there had been a story of one named by my name, and called by that sweet love-name which she had sent out somewhat ruthless into the night; and the girl’s name had been Mirdath; and when first she, Naani had called, there had come back to her a cry of Mirdath, Mirdath; and this had minded her so strangely of that olden story which had stayed in her memory; that she had answered as the maid in that book might have answered.
The situation is reminiscent of Aragorn meeting Arwen for the first time and calling "Tinúviel, Tinúviel!" based on the story of Beren and Lúthien. Like Arwen, Naani is portrayed as the hero's destined love interest. For the sake of his true love, the hero is willing to commit to a dangerous adventure, though the reasons for that are different from how they are in Tolkien.
Most people would agree that the romance is the worst part of The Night Land though (to the point of sometimes even advising other people to skip straight to the Chapter 2 of the book), so it's no wonder Tolkien de-emphasized Aragorn and Arwen's romance despite its importance to the underlying plot and delegated the biggest part of what did get in to the Appendices.
3. The Mystery of the One Ring
3.1 Of Traditional Magic Rings
Searching for a possible source of inspiration for the One Ring has long been an endeavor that has failed to locate a truly good candidate. Folklore contains many magical rings, but none of them have been found to be a good match for the One Ring. Bilbo's harmless and useful ring in The Hobbit is in its function a typical example of a magic ring in folklore. Cursed rings exist in folklore too, but are enablers of tragedy plots for the ring's owners and those around them rather than threats to the entire world. The One Ring exists on a level well above the traditional rings of European folklore.
(Wagner's ring is getting closer to the One Ring territory in power and significance but doesn't really reach it. Tolkien also denied that the One Ring was inspired by Wagner's ring, so I will go on. I will also not dwell on the rings of non-European myth and religion. Though I do think the concept of the Ringlord as a powerful ruler is derived from non-European sources, those could not have generated many of the special traits of the One Ring.)
The source of the difficulty is that in the transition from The Hobbit to The Lord of the Rings the One Ring grows from its humble origins as a simple invisibility ring into a fundamentally different object, one that can't be really said to have been based on the rings of European folklore, one that has the power of invisibility almost as an afterthought.
Therefore I think the solution is to look in a different direction. Rather than trying to find a pre-Tolkien finger-ring with the characteristics of the One Ring, we are looking for an item that could have inspired Bilbo's traditional magic ring to transform into something new.
3.2 Magic Rings and Magic Circles
For the item that could have sparked the transition into the One Ring, I present the Electric Circle that surrounds and protects the Great Redoubt in The Night Land. The Electric Circle is in its essence a technological version of a magic circle that wards against corporeal and incorporeal evil and could be called, in a literal sense, a Ring of (Electric) Power. The term "Ring of Power" does not appear in Tolkien's works before The Lord of the Rings.
I do not think that Tolkien copied the One Ring straight from the Electric Circle. I think his inspiration was of a more complicated sort and involves mirror-opposites. I am reminded of a (seemingly-unrelated?) line from Letter 229: "Both rings were round, and there the resemblance ceases."
The Electric Circle:
- depends on continuous external power supply to function
- protects from mental and physical corruption and enslavement
- keeps monsters away
- purely defensive and protects millions without discrimination
- needs only to be powered on to function to full effect
- miles-wide stationary public infrastructure made of a circle of thin, transparent tubing of some sort
- extremely bright and visible
- only one is necessary to protect everyone
- it going permanently offline would be a decisive triumph for Evil
The One Ring:
- self-sufficient and extremely hard to destroy
- causes mental and physical corruption and enslavement
- draws Gollum and the Nazgûl
- gives power over others to one individual only
- takes time to master
- a small piece of jewelry made of solid gold
- has the power of invisibility
- many other rings were made and add much to the utility of the One Ring
- its destruction would be a decisive triumph over Evil
The One Ring additionally gives the power of understanding monster languages. There is no indication that the Electric Circle has any powers along those lines (though the people of the Great Redoubt indeed do not understand the languages of the enemies), but Tolkien could simply have decided that the Mirkwood spiders should not talk to each other in Common Speech in a self-consistent world and so gave a new power to Bilbo's ring in order to retroactively fix the issue outside of any particular inspiration.
An additional point is that the society of the Great Redoubt has remained stable and unchanging to a supernatural degree, even linguistically, to the point that Tolkien's Elves would be astonished. Tolkien himself as a linguist would have found such a stasis inexplicable without magic. The Night Land does not give any form of justification for the stasis, but this means the book also does not rule out the possibility for an underlying supernatural explanation. I am reminded of the Elven rings and their power to preserve things and locations unchanged.
Anyway, I think the above listings have too many and too specific anti-similarities for two different ring-shaped objects to be credible as serial coincidences, at least in the light of the many direct and uncomplicated similarities that also exist between The Night Land and The Lord of the Rings.
3.3 The One Ring, a Girl
Now for a really surprising idea about The Night Land in relation to Tolkien. I propose that the heroine, to whom the main character frequently refers as "Mine Own" (short for "mine own One"), was an additional inspiration for the One Ring.
Wait, what?
You see, the main character of The Night Land is obsessed in an unhealthy way over his love interest, and the personality of the love interest is... flawed to say the least. (The hero is flawed too, basically an anti-Frodo, but this is wandering off-topic.) Consider for example the events in Chapter 1, which raise important questions about human nature, like what is a charming character quirk suitable for a romantic heroine and what is just being cruel.
Even if William Hope Hodgson didn't see his own heroine in that way, I think Tolkien very well could have, having a very different taste in women, which shows through in his own writing. None of Tolkien's heroines behave like Mirdath/Naani. Galadriel corrupted by the One Ring might get the closest among the lot. The One Ring if taken as a character could possibly get closer still. It could be argued (though it would definitely be very controversial) that the heroine is in fact the true villain of The Night Land.
In fact, I could easily see Tolkien thinking that in The Night Land, the hero should rather have gone on a quest to get rid of the heroine, thus precipitating the idea for Frodo's anti-quest.
(There are some additional points in support of this idea that are unfortunately involved with the ending spoilers.)
4. Conclusion
I hope this overview serves to demonstrate something of the large extent of The Night Land influence which I think can be detected in The Lord of the Rings.
There are many things that I decided not to address in the above sections. For example, someone might make the argument that Mordor was based on Morgoth's earlier domains. However, it turns out that Morgoth did not cover the land with dark fumes in the early stories and only started doing so in the later, revised versions, which would have drawn from The Lord of the Rings material rather than the other way around. I also mentioned only some of the more major and undeniable of the geographic connections, and so on.
Another issue entirely and a very complex and difficult one is the possibility that the example of The Night Land influenced how Tolkien handled religious themes in The Lord of the Rings. (A good argument could be made that the Night Land, despite the superficial veneer of scientific rationalism, is literally Hell.)
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noWizardme
Gondolin
Dec 18 2025, 1:02pm
Post #2 of 11
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I'd never heard of William Hope Hodgson before reading this, let alone read of anyone comparing his work with Tolkien's.
Just to repeat the link you included S_G, anyone wanting to read The Night Land can do so for free on Project Gutenberg And then everyone, I suppose, comes to their own conclusion as to whether on the balance of probabilities the similarities between the texts are so striking that Tolkien being influenced by WH Hodgson seems the best explanation.
The alternative explanations (which I know you will have considered, S-G) are that these ideas could have arisen independently, or could be based upon the same tropes whcih perhaps could be shown to be circulating in the British Edwardian cultural air.
All those are of course judgements, and so far, so subjective. One fan or scholar is likely to conclude one way, another differently
But: isn't it interesting, however these parallels came about?
~~~~~~
"I am not made for querulous pests." Frodo 'Spooner' Baggins.
(This post was edited by noWizardme on Dec 18 2025, 1:02pm)
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Silvered-glass
Nargothrond
Dec 19 2025, 12:44am
Post #3 of 11
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I'd never heard of William Hope Hodgson before reading this, let alone read of anyone comparing his work with Tolkien's.
My local library when I was a teenager had a copy of The House on the Borderland. I've also seen the short stories The Voice in the Night, The Derelict, Eloi Eloi Lama Sabachthani, and The Hog collected in different anthologies. Later on I tried to order a copy of The House on the Borderland over the Internet because it had left such good memories, but found out that everything by William Hope Hodgson had gone out of print.
Some years after that I encountered the Night Land fansite, which led me to awareness that The Night Land had come into public domain and was now freely available on the Internet for people such as myself to read. So I read the entire thing. Later still I got a proper deadtree version thanks to the Fantasy Masterworks reprint series (The House on the Borderland and Other Novels, which also includes The Night Land).
It seems to me that awareness of William Hope Hodgson has been increasing in the recent years probably due to the benefits of the public domain. I've seen his name mentioned in literature discussions elsewhere on the Internet. He gets mentioned in conjunction with Lovecraft rather than Tolkien.
For people interested in getting into William Hope Hodgson something like The Voice in the Night would be a much shorter and friendlier introduction (assuming they like horror), but for the purposes of this thread, The Night Land is it for good or ill.
If the romance in Chapter 1 of The Night Land is too harsh to endure, skipping straight to Chapter 2 is possible at the cost of losing some thematic depth and characterization.
And then everyone, I suppose, comes to their own conclusion as to whether on the balance of probabilities the similarities between the texts are so striking that Tolkien being influenced by WH Hodgson seems the best explanation.
The alternative explanations (which I know you will have considered, S-G) are that these ideas could have arisen independently, or could be based upon the same tropes whcih perhaps could be shown to be circulating in the British Edwardian cultural air.
All those are of course judgements, and so far, so subjective. One fan or scholar is likely to conclude one way, another differently
But: isn't it interesting, however these parallels came about?
As an example of how innovative the book is, The Night Land contains what is said to be the very first example of an arcology (not yet called by that name) in fiction, and I certainly cannot point to something earlier. And trying to think of an early work of speculative fiction similar to The Night Land only brings up Edgar Rice Burroughs's Mars stories, which also use building blocks such as heroes, monsters, and princesses on a dying world, but which aren't very similar to The Night Land at all and lack the Tolkien connections I pointed out in the opening post. Trying to compare Barsoom to Mordor feels like such a mismatch...
The plot of The Night Land is also very simple. I refrained from spoiling the ending and also tried to keep the major plot twists a surprise, but I really ended up spoiling quite a bit at least vaguely, simply because the major points in the story are so connected to Tolkien. This is not a case of picking one or two subplots that feel like Tolkien out of ten subplots. There are hardly any subplots in the first place, and the Tolkien connections are all over the main plot, playing prominent roles.
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noWizardme
Gondolin
Dec 20 2025, 4:38pm
Post #4 of 11
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It seems to me that awareness of William Hope Hodgson has been increasing in the recent years probably due to the benefits of the public domain. I've seen his name mentioned in literature discussions elsewhere on the Internet. He gets mentioned in conjunction with Lovecraft rather than Tolkien.
It's an odd thing, isn't it, how some authors go out of and then back into public awareness. Robert Louis Stevenson for example was very widely admired in his own time. Then put into a children's author and horror author 'box' by many in the early part of the Twentieth Century (There is some snobbery about both of those 'genres' not being 'serious literature'.) And then later, he was once again attracting wider admiration and attention.
But I'd bet that many people who have never read Treasure Island or Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde would find they know some basics of what those books are about. Though perhaps the would be basing their thoughts on movies, other adaptations, or how ideas about fictional pirates or Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde have become part of popular culture.
A sort of 'Mad Baggins' effect, where some interesting details remain in the collective mind long after the original story has got mixed up or forgotten.
A very versatile writer, Stevenson. A favourite story of mine is The Bottle Imp (available public domain here). A similarity between The Bottle Imp and LOTR is that both are in many ways the opposite of a conventional quest. The problem is how to get rid of a diabolical artifact safely (there being a catch to just throwing it away) rather than to collecting some more usual McGuffin.
Who knows: maybe if history had been a little different, JRR Tolkien would have gone in and out of the limelight (or be a much more obscure taste now than is actually the case). I don't think this sort of thing is explained entirely by the objective qualities of one work or another.
~~~~~~
"I am not made for querulous pests." Frodo 'Spooner' Baggins.
(This post was edited by noWizardme on Dec 20 2025, 4:45pm)
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Silvered-glass
Nargothrond
Dec 21 2025, 11:05pm
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Extra Influences on the One Ring
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A very versatile writer, Stevenson. A favourite story of mine is The Bottle Imp ( available public domain here). A similarity between The Bottle Imp and LOTR is that both are in many ways the opposite of a conventional quest. The problem is how to get rid of a diabolical artifact safely (there being a catch to just throwing it away) rather than to collecting some more usual McGuffin.
I just finished (re)reading The Bottle Imp. Initially I thought I had never read it before, but it didn't take me long to realize that I had already encountered the story before, picked from the children's section back when I was maybe 10. Even today I could still remember the general direction of the plot and approximately how the story ended, so I was unfortunately badly spoiled by my younger self. As a side note, I remember reading a very old deal-with-the-Devil horror novel for high school that had something of a similar theme as The Bottle Imp but an entirely different plot progression. I think that novel might have inspired The Bottle Imp as a more lighthearted wish-fulfillment take on the theme that takes an opposite path, but as I'm failing to track down the title and the author of the horror novel who appears to have increased in obscurity, that line of thought will have to remain uncompleted.
Anyway, I had been thinking in the past that LotR Book 1, Chapter 1 reads like setup for a deal-with-the-Devil tale, with Bilbo as the contractor who sees his time running out, but then the plot just never goes there. The wealth somehow granted by being in possession of the One Ring can be compared to the possession of the bottle in The Bottle Imp, but then that aspect of the One Ring just sort of fades away, as if Tolkien had changed his mind about what sort of evil artifact the Ring was supposed to be but didn't want to change his initial plot too much. An additional detail that has no bearing at all on the real plot of the book is how Bilbo's birthday party can be seen as an advanced negative-money solution to the magic bottle problem and Frodo's arduous quest as a way of topping that negative price. There are no visible influences from The Night Land in LotR Book 1, Chapter 1, so I think it's well possible that Tolkien had already started the writing of LotR when he read and was influenced by The Night Land, ultimately inducing him to take the story to a new direction.
And by the way, another magic item that may have had some influence on the One Ring and in particular its mental effects is the titular beautiful object from the short story Through the Dragon Glass by Abraham Merritt, who used to be a very popular author back in the day.
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noWizardme
Gondolin
Dec 22 2025, 10:55am
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Stevenson's bottle imp and Bilbo's non-comuppance
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I notice that Stevenson starts his story with a note to readers cheerfully admitting that the core idea is not totally original:
Note.—Any student of that very unliterary product, the English drama of the early part of the century, will here recognise the name and the root idea of a piece once rendered popular by the redoubtable O. Smith. The root idea is there and identical, and yet I hope I have made it a new thing. And the fact that the tale has been designed and written for a Polynesian audience may lend it some extraneous interest nearer home.—R. L. S. RL Stevenson's "The Bottle Imp" story on Project Gutenberg
And fair enough! But I don't know the story by O.Smith he's talking about (and assuming his initial English radership would recognize).
I liked your thought about LOTR starting out as if Bilbo is about to get a supernatural commuppance. S-G, you said:
Anyway, I had been thinking in the past that LotR Book 1, Chapter 1 reads like setup for a deal-with-the-Devil tale, with Bilbo as the contractor who sees his time running out, but then the plot just never goes there. The wealth somehow granted by being in possession of the One Ring can be compared to the possession of the bottle in The Bottle Imp, but then that aspect of the One Ring just sort of fades away, as if Tolkien had changed his mind about what sort of evil artifact the Ring was supposed to be but didn't want to change his initial plot too much. An additional detail that has no bearing at all on the real plot of the book is how Bilbo's birthday party can be seen as an advanced negative-money solution to the magic bottle problem and Frodo's arduous quest as a way of topping that negative price.
I agree Tolkien saw that readers might think this, and so he has Gandalf put up some sinage. (All the following are from Book I Ch 2):
Gandalf reassures Frodo that Bilbo is quite likely to suffer no lasting harm:
“ 'He felt better at once,’ said Gandalf. ‘But there is only one Power in this world that knows all about the Rings and their effects; and as far as I know there is no Power in the world that knows all about hobbits. Among the Wise I am the only one that goes in for hobbit-lore: an obscure branch of knowledge, but full of surprises. Soft as butter they can be, and yet sometimes as tough as old tree-roots. I think it likely that some would resist the Rings far longer than most of the Wise would believe. I don’t think you need worry about Bilbo.
‘Of course, he possessed the ring for many years, and used it, so it might take a long while for the influence to wear off – before it was safe for him to see it again, for instance. Otherwise, he might live on for years, quite happily: just stop as he was when he parted with it. For he gave it up in the end of his own accord: an important point. No, I was not troubled about dear Bilbo any more, once he had let the thing go. It is for you that I feel responsible.”
Parantetical bit: Here we enounter an important difference between the Ring's magic in LOTR and The Bottle Imp's magic in Stevenson's story. As Gandalf says here, nobody can really say how the Ring is going to affect Bilbo or Frodo. By contrast, in Stevenson's storyt's entirely clear what the consequences of owning the Bottle-imp are:
this passage Keawe, the first character to buy the bottle has the deal clearly explained to him by it's previsours owner (as this is the plot set up at the beginning I feel it's no spoiler to share it)
“There is no reason,” said the man, “why you should not have a house in all points similar to this, and finer, if you wish. You have some money, I suppose?” “I have fifty dollars,” said Keawe; “but a house like this will cost more than fifty dollars.” The man made a computation. “I am sorry you have no more,” said he, “for it may raise you trouble in the future; but it shall be yours at fifty dollars.” “The house?” asked Keawe. “No, not the house,” replied the man; “but the bottle. For, I must tell you, although I appear to you so rich and fortunate, all my fortune, and this house itself and its garden, came out of a bottle not much bigger than a pint. This is it.” And he opened a lockfast place, and took out a round-bellied bottle with a long neck; the glass of it was white like milk, with changing rainbow colours in the grain. Withinsides something obscurely moved, like a shadow and a fire. “Of glass it is,” replied the man, sighing more heavily than ever; “but the glass of it was tempered in the flames of hell. An imp lives in it, and that is the shadow we behold there moving: or so I suppose. If any man buy this bottle the imp is at his command; all that he desires—love, fame, money, houses like this house, ay, or a city like this city—all are his at the word uttered. Napoleon had this bottle, and by it he grew to be the king of the world; but he sold it at the last, and fell. Captain Cook had this bottle, and by it he found his way to so many islands; but he, too, sold it, and was slain upon Hawaii. For, once it is sold, the power goes and the protection; and unless a man remain content with what he has, ill will befall him.” “And yet you talk of selling it yourself?” Keawe said. “I have all I wish, and I am growing elderly,” replied the man. “There is one thing the imp cannot do—he cannot prolong life; and, it would not be fair to conceal from you, there is a drawback to the bottle; for if a man die before he sells it, he must burn in hell forever.” The Bottle Imp by RL Stevenson
This puts The Bottle imp in teh category that Brandon Sanderson calls 'hard magic:
[Where the] authors explicitly describes the rules of magic. This is done so that the reader can have the fun of feeling like they themselves are part of the magic, and so that the author can show clever twists and turns in the way the magic works. The magic itself is a character, and by showing off its laws and rules, the author is able to provide twists, worldbuilding, and characterization. If the reader understands how the magic works, then you can use the magic (or, rather, the characters using the magic) to solve problems. In this case, it’s not the magic mystically making everything better. Instead, it’s the characters’ wit and experience that solves the problems. Magic becomes another tool—and, like any other tool, its careful application can enhance the character and the plot. Sanderson's First Law
That's not (mostly) how it works in LOTR, whcih indeed Sanderson discusses in his artlcle
End of Parantetical bit and back to Gandalfand Frodo.
Then we're to understand that Gandalf realises Frodo has been placed in danger (but has reasoned this is an unfortunate necessity):
‘Of course, my dear Frodo, it was dangerous for you; and that has troubled me deeply. But there was so much at stake that I had to take some risk – though even when I was far away there has never been a day when the Shire has not been guarded by watchful eyes. As long as you never used it, I did not think that the Ring would have any lasting effect on you, not for evil, not at any rate for a very long time. And you must remember that nine years ago, when I last saw you, I still knew little for certain.’
And then, Gandalf clears Bilbo of having deliberately saved himself by jeapordising Frodo:
'Bilbo knew no more than he told you, I am sure,’ said Gandalf. ‘He would certainly never have passed on to you anything that he thought would be a danger, even though I promised to look after you. He thought the ring was very beautiful, and very useful at need; and if anything was wrong or queer, it was himself. He said that it was “growing on his mind”, and he was always worrying about it; but he did not suspect that the ring itself was to blame.'
~~~~~~
"I am not made for querulous pests." Frodo 'Spooner' Baggins.
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Silvered-glass
Nargothrond
Dec 22 2025, 11:03am
Post #7 of 11
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To clarify on the above, I was able to track down the horror novel I mentioned, and it's Melmoth the Wanderer by Charles Maturin.
Tolkien probably wouldn't have approved of Melmoth the Wanderer because of its strong anti-Catholic themes, but it looks like the novel nevertheless might be two steps away from The Lord of the Rings on the chain of influences going through The Bottle Imp, assuming that one really was a minor influence instead of something more obscure with similar content.
I am aware that this thread has wandered far into the off-topic land away from the Night Land.
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Silvered-glass
Nargothrond
Dec 22 2025, 1:03pm
Post #8 of 11
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I notice that Stevenson starts his story with a note to readers cheerfully admitting that the core idea is not totally original: Note.—Any student of that very unliterary product, the English drama of the early part of the century, will here recognise the name and the root idea of a piece once rendered popular by the redoubtable O. Smith. The root idea is there and identical, and yet I hope I have made it a new thing. And the fact that the tale has been designed and written for a Polynesian audience may lend it some extraneous interest nearer home.—R. L. S. RL Stevenson's "The Bottle Imp" story on Project GutenbergAnd fair enough! But I don't know the story by O.Smith he's talking about (and assuming his initial English radership would recognize).
I have no idea who O. Smith was, but I'm guessing someone who wrote about a djinn bottle that grants wishes.
Melmoth the Wanderer is a story in which Melmoth makes a deal with the Devil that has a condition that Melmoth can save his soul from damnation if he manages to pass the deal to someone else before his extended lifespan runs out.
I agree Tolkien saw that readers might think this, and so he has Gandalf put up some sinage. (All the following are from Book I Ch 2): Gandalf reassures Frodo that Bilbo is quite likely to suffer no lasting harm:
“ 'He felt better at once,’ said Gandalf. ‘But there is only one Power in this world that knows all about the Rings and their effects; and as far as I know there is no Power in the world that knows all about hobbits. Among the Wise I am the only one that goes in for hobbit-lore: an obscure branch of knowledge, but full of surprises. Soft as butter they can be, and yet sometimes as tough as old tree-roots. I think it likely that some would resist the Rings far longer than most of the Wise would believe. I don’t think you need worry about Bilbo.
‘Of course, he possessed the ring for many years, and used it, so it might take a long while for the influence to wear off – before it was safe for him to see it again, for instance. Otherwise, he might live on for years, quite happily: just stop as he was when he parted with it. For he gave it up in the end of his own accord: an important point. No, I was not troubled about dear Bilbo any more, once he had let the thing go. It is for you that I feel responsible.”
Gandalf had to terrify Bilbo into giving up the Ring though... Strangely enough, Book 1, Chapter 1 puts Gandalf in the position of the Devil in a deal-with-the-Devil story that never really comes to pass.
Parantetical bit: Here we enounter an important difference between the Ring's magic in LOTR and The Bottle Imp's magic in Stevenson's story. As Gandalf says here, nobody can really say how the Ring is going to affect Bilbo or Frodo. By contrast, in Stevenson's storyt's entirely clear what the consequences of owning the Bottle-imp are:
The Bottle Imp doesn't explain how the entity in the bottle fulfills all those wishes though. For example, are the wishes for money that don't specify the source taken from someone's pocket or a bank vault or created out of thin air? How natural-seeming was Keawe's uncle's rise in prosperity and what that would imply about the wish powers? How does the imp manipulate a skilled architect to be in the right place at the right time making the right designs or was that the imp in disguise? Could someone wish for the existence of a unit of currency worth one tenth of a centime? Was the Chinese Evil just bad luck or caused by the bottle? Also, we don't have any positive evidence that the damnation part is real... or that the damnation avoidance part is real.
As for LotR, I think someone with sufficient knowledge of hobbit-lore and ring-lore both would be able to predict the Ring's effects on Frodo and Bilbo.
For example, it is known that the hobbit race had a dark past of some sort in the East. It is also known that hobbits have ancient tales that mention Mordor. So I wouldn't consider it impossible that Sauron in fact had had dealings with hobbits long ago and had enough knowledge of hobbit-lore to predict how a hobbit would be affected by the One Ring.
This puts The Bottle imp in teh category that Brandon Sanderson calls 'hard magic: [Where the] authors explicitly describes the rules of magic. This is done so that the reader can have the fun of feeling like they themselves are part of the magic, and so that the author can show clever twists and turns in the way the magic works. The magic itself is a character, and by showing off its laws and rules, the author is able to provide twists, worldbuilding, and characterization. If the reader understands how the magic works, then you can use the magic (or, rather, the characters using the magic) to solve problems. In this case, it’s not the magic mystically making everything better. Instead, it’s the characters’ wit and experience that solves the problems. Magic becomes another tool—and, like any other tool, its careful application can enhance the character and the plot. Sanderson's First LawThat's not (mostly) how it works in LOTR, whcih indeed Sanderson discusses in his artlcle
LotR comes across as soft-magic because of the hobbit viewpoint. The Elves do not see what they do as magic because it is entirely predictable to them. The creation of the Rings also would have required a hard-magic approach that was essentially a form of technology.
The Night Land in turn has such a technological approach that the story could be considered science fiction even though it has malevolent spirit beings that tempt people to destruction being stopped by a circle on the ground, etc. The reader also has very little understanding of the fictional physics, so that the story could equally be seen as soft-magic fantasy with a bit of technology flavor. This approach is deep down not so different from Tolkien's.
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noWizardme
Gondolin
Dec 22 2025, 4:54pm
Post #9 of 11
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yes, a property of the storytelling approach, not the fictional world
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.LotR comes across as soft-magic because of the hobbit viewpoint. The Elves do not see what they do as magic because it is entirely predictable to them. The creation of the Rings also would have required a hard-magic approach that was essentially a form of technology.
The Night Land in turn has such a technological approach that the story could be considered science fiction even though it has malevolent spirit beings that tempt people to destruction being stopped by a circle on the ground, etc. The reader also has very little understanding of the fictional physics, so that the story could equally be seen as soft-magic fantasy with a bit of technology flavor. This approach is deep down not so different from Tolkien's.
I think that's a good an interesting distinction about LOTR coming across as 'soft magic' because of the viewpoint. This shows that the distinction is about the storyteller's choices - whose point of view? How much information is revealed and in what way? As a consequence, how will the audience understand what's going on or feel suspense? Probably, fictional fantasy worlds are not normally inherently 'soft magic' or 'hard magic'.
Yes, certainly Stevenson explains The Magical Predicament clearly thus creating suspense about how he's going to get his characters out of it. But he doesna' have to explain everything (that would probably get pretty boring in fact). I think this has to do with what teh 'Turkey City Lexicon' calls 'the edges of ideas:
The solution to the “Info-Dump” problem (how to fill in the background). The theory is that, as above, the mechanics of an interstellar drive (the center of the idea) is not important: all that matters is the impact on your characters: they can get to other planets in a few months, and, oh yeah, it gives them hallucinations about past lives. Or, more radically: the physics of TV transmission is the center of an idea; on the edges of it we find people turning into couch potatoes because they no longer have to leave home for entertainment. Or, more bluntly: we don’t need info dump at all. We just need a clear picture of how people’s lives have been affected by their background. This is also known as “carrying extrapolation into the fabric of daily life.” Turkey City Lexicon – A Primer for SF Workshops (published by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association)
I also wanted to agree that The Night Lands' technological setting doesn't mean it can't explore similar themes or ideas to a magial-based story. Technology that you don't understand might as well be magic (to parphrase Asimov).
Personally I see fantasy and science-fiction as pretty alike. They both tend to involve things that (as a matter of conventional opinion at least) aren't real in the Primary World. And - to me at least - the stories are intereting or not according to what this enables the storyteller to explore.
For example, the abiity to become invisible. Done in a hard science fiction way by HG Wells The Invisible Man (at least, 'hard science fiction' in that Wells takes some time to make a hand-waving explanation of how the technology works. But of course he can't go too far on that explanation, or he'd have a proposal for a working invisibility device, not a story idea). But, to my mind at least, the story is not so much about the mechanisms of becoming invisible as the way having such a power interacts with someone's character. Griffin, Wells' eponymous invisible character is, a nasty piece of work. Which we also get, of course when Smeagol gets The Ring, and is invisible by magic, not technology. So the setting is different, but similar themes come up.
You might say that both Griffin and Smeagol have responed to invisibility by becoming enslaved by their appetites (or they were already so prior to becoming invisible and having more power just makes it worse). By contrast Bilbo and Frodo remain rationally in control of themselves for longer. And those (probably by co-incidence) are also the possible outcomes of invisibility, according to Plato (Several poeple have suggested that Tollien knew and may have been influenced by the 'Ring of Gyges' story - see references in that wikipedia article).
~~~~~~
"I am not made for querulous pests." Frodo 'Spooner' Baggins.
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Silvered-glass
Nargothrond
Jan 8, 1:15pm
Post #10 of 11
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I think that's a good an interesting distinction about LOTR coming across as 'soft magic' because of the viewpoint. This shows that the distinction is about the storyteller's choices - whose point of view? How much information is revealed and in what way? As a consequence, how will the audience understand what's going on or feel suspense? Probably, fictional fantasy worlds are not normally inherently 'soft magic' or 'hard magic'.
I think theoretically every fantasy world when taken as a world instead of a literary construction would be deep down hard magic, even if the rules for magic that could be researched by in-world wizard-scientists are extremely obtuse and complicated and/or dependent on the psychology outside intelligent beings, but the author and/or the characters in the story can still see the story as soft magic, and the readers even more so. The author can also cause logical inconsistencies that are difficult to solve, but even in those circumstances some literary equivalent of epicycles should theoretically work out, even if it isn't simple or elegant.
Yes, certainly Stevenson explains The Magical Predicament clearly thus creating suspense about how he's going to get his characters out of it. But he doesna' have to explain everything (that would probably get pretty boring in fact).
Keawe confirmed many things about the functioning of the bottle except the key detail that drives the plot: what happens when someone dies in possession of the bottle. For that we only have the word of a man in San Francisco who in the best case was repeating nth-hand information and in the worst case was intentionally lying. You see, it is entirely plausible (and indeed in my opinion makes more sense than the surface reading when you think about it) that the initial owner of the bottle in San Francisco was in fact the Devil who was aiming to corrupt the soul of the virtuous but unwary Keawe (and others) with the lure of unlimited wishes at potentially no cost, the idea being that when Keawe was focused on the idea that he could save his soul by passing the bottle to someone else, he could without realizing it fall into sin that could send him to Hell for real.
I also wanted to agree that The Night Lands' technological setting doesn't mean it can't explore similar themes or ideas to a magial-based story. Technology that you don't understand might as well be magic (to parphrase Asimov).
Personally I see fantasy and science-fiction as pretty alike. They both tend to involve things that (as a matter of conventional opinion at least) aren't real in the Primary World. And - to me at least - the stories are intereting or not according to what this enables the storyteller to explore.
The Night Land isn't clear-cut science fiction even if the human society in it has advanced technology including electricity. The lines between science fiction and fantasy are indistinct in old works surprisingly often. That's why you can see a religious allegory/fantasy like A Voyage to Arcturus by David Lindsay being called science fiction simply because most of the action takes place on a fictional planet of the star Arcturus. The Night Land predates the current marketing categories too, and I think a very good argument could be made that the Night Land with its fires and darkness is literally Hell and that the main character had died unsaved...
Among William Hope Hodgson's other works are the occult detective Carnacki the Ghost-Finder stories, a collection of which I read over the Christmas. These stories, despite being about real and suspected supernatural occurrences in the normal contemporary world, appear to have shared worldbuilding elements with The Night Land.
For example consider the short story The Gateway of the Monster, which also has some interesting possible LotR connections of a spoilery nature that almost would have merited mentioning in the opening post. The short story in question would not normally be considered science fiction in any way, but it has the detail that Carnacki uses, among more conventional methods to ward off evil, a battery-powered Electric Pentacle built from the new technology of vacuum tubes. In a chronologically later story The Hog Carnacki even experiments with circular vacuum tubes, which are even easier to compare to the Electric Circle of The Night Land. The significance of this all is that, based on the worldbuilding information from the Carnacki stories, I therefore can conclude that a pentagram drawn on the floor with chalk or a Christian cross would in all likelihood have some effectiveness against the monsters of the Night Land too, which is hardly what you'd expect from real science fiction.
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Silvered-glass
Nargothrond
Jan 12, 4:18pm
Post #11 of 11
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Addendum: The Crack of Doom and the Crack of Earth-Current (feat. Algernon Blackwood)
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I encountered the following paragraph while reading the Wikipedia article on Algernon Blackwood:
In the first draft of his guidance notes to translators of his work, "Nomenclature of The Lord of the Rings", J. R. R. Tolkien stated that he derived the phrase "crack of doom" from an unnamed story by Blackwood.[24] In her book, Tolkien's Modern Reading, Holly Ordway states that this unnamed Blackwood work is his 1909 novel The Education of Uncle Paul. She explains that the children of Paul's sister, whom he is visiting, tell him of the "crack between Yesterday and To-morrow", and that "if we're very quick, we can find the crack and slip through... And, once inside there, there's no time, of course... Anything may happen, and everything come true." Ordway comments that this would have attracted Tolkien because of his interest in travelling back in time.[25]
However actually reading The Education of Uncle Paul reveals that the supposed inspiration is on very shaky ground (and also that the novel contains no actual time travel). In the book the children show the main character a spatial crack that appears briefly when the church bell tolls midnight and can be crossed in the space between the sixth and the seventh strokes of the bell. The crack leads to a timeless place that would be easier to compare to Lórien than anything in Mordor. In later chapters the appearing of the Crack is not so limited as it becomes clearer that the Crack is a metaphor for being in touch with one's inner world and is connected to the main character unlocking his creativity.
From Chapter XXVII:
The wings of memory and phantasy, withdrawing softly, left a soothed feeling in his heart. In that region of creative imagination known as the ‘Crack’ he always found peace and at least a measure of joy.
It should go without saying that this all has remarkably little to do with Tolkien's Crack of Doom, but apparently this thing is the best match involving the common word "crack" that can be found in Algernon Blackwood's voluminous oeuvre. It makes one wonder if there might be a case of mistaken identification somewhere in this.
Regardless of possible efforts to make the crack fit (possibly involving the interpretation that Tolkien may well have thought that Blackwood's Uncle Paul as portrayed in the story was headed straight to the hellfire after death despite Blackwood's attempts to paint the story in a twee and child-friendly light) or combing through Blackwood's other stories for overlooked uses of the word, I think it bears to consider the possibility that the elderly Tolkien confused two authors of weird fiction who had both died many years in the past and were no longer fresh in his mind. The mention of Blackwood only appearing in the first draft and vanishing afterwards, like a mistake that was erased, should count for something when assessing the evidence.
My proposed alternative source for the Crack of Doom is the Crack of Earth-Current from The Night Land. These two cracks actually have things in common that don't require great efforts to discover.
The Crack of Doom in Mordor and the Crack of Earth-Current in the Night Land are physical chasms associated with volcanism as well as sources of plot-critical power where events culminate in some way in a turning point in the story (the details of which are omitted to not spoil quite everything in this post). The Crack of Earth-Current is the source of the Earth-Current on which the Great Redoubt depends on for its existence, while the powers of the Crack of Doom are left more vague but were somehow used by Sauron to craft the One Ring. Both Sauron and the people of the Great Redoubt also have the ability to direct volcanic eruptions. (In some ways the Great Redoubt is really quite similar to Barad-dûr and other places in Middle-earth besides Minas Tirith.)
The Crack of Earth-Current was one of the obvious connections to Tolkien that I cut from the text of the opening post. The evidence was well strong enough for inclusion, but the involvement with he spoilery plot developments that touch important matters was the deciding factor.
The last chapters of The Night Land in general have some very remarkable Tolkien connections that I refrained from describing, though I've been thinking that maybe I should have gone for full spoilers to make my argument more convincing and harder to ignore.
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