Originally posted by: Han Solo VS Indiana Jones
Everything is a blatant rip off of something else. Hell, Tolkien and CS Lewis more than likely ripped off old myths they were familiar with and used them for their stories.

Actually, since Tolkien was a professor at Oxford and had a lot of dealings with the old English mythology (he even has a published translation of
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl, and Sir Orfeo) he definitely drew on them for his LOTR and other books. He expecially drew a lot from Beowulf; for instance, the stuff with Smaug's lair in The Hobbit bears a lot of resemblance to some bits about the dragon's lair in Beowulf, like the fact that a thief stole a trinket from the dragon's hoard, and the dragon therefore got angry and destroyed a nearby town.