***LIVING BLOG POST: Hello all. I am too busy to blog these days, but I nevertheless want to share some ideas with all of you. A “living” blog post is a blog post that is essentially a Work in Progress, and can be added to at any time, when time and allows. In this particular case, the topic is quite large.***

**February 25, 2026 Update: I am trying to get up the first half of this piece online as fast as possible. Who would have thought that analyzing the similarities between two books with a combined length of 1,800 pages would be a lot of work?! I am hoping to have at least the first half of this article up by the end of March.***

THE SIMILARITIES BETWEEN THE SWORD OF SHANNARA AND THE LORD OF THE RINGS

Names Featured In The Sword of Shannara:

Durin – In Sword, it is the name of one of the Elf brothers. In Tolkien’s works, Durin is the name of the one of the most prominent Dwarves in Middle-Earth history. Dwarves are often even referred to as Durin’s Folk. It is surmised that Tolkien got this name from an Old Norse poem. It is unknown if Terry Brooks received the name from Tolkien directly, or an older source.
Balinor – In Sword, Balinor is the prince of Tyrsis and an all-around good adventurer. This name could be a mix of two elements from Tolkien’s work: Balin is one of the thirteen Dwarves in The Hobbit, and Valinor is an Elven home from the early ages of the mythology. It could be figured that Terry Brooks mixed these two together.
Ohmsford – Not sure if this is a stretch or not, but I think it should be noted that the last name of the main character, Shea Ohmsford (the Frodo surrogate of this tale) includes the letters F-R-O-D-O, with an additional few letters. Not sure if this means anything, but I’d never seen it pointed out before.
Elfstone(s) – In the Shannara setting, The Elfstones are powerful talismans that the heroes use to combat evil. In Tolkien’s works, “Elfstone” is the translation of Elessar. Without getting into too many details, Elessar was both a collection of gems from Valinor, later given to Aragorn, who adopted the name. Terry Brooks’ follow-up novel to Sword was titled The Elfstones of Shannara.

Tom Shippey’s Excellent Breakdown of Shannara from his book, J.R.R. Tolkien, Author the Century

This is from page 232 of the Houghton Mifflin edition. (ISBN: 9780618257591)

“The most obvious example is Terry Brooks’s generally derided, but still commercially successful, The Sword of Shannara. Rumour has it that when this came out in 1977 it had been comissioned by astute editos who knew they could sell anything sufficiently Tolkienian. If so, the editors were right. The ‘Shannara’ sequence is still running twenty years later, and is up to eight volumes. Yet the strange thing about the first volume at least is the dogged way in which it follows Tolkien point for point. A group is assembled to retrieve a talisman from the power of a Dark Lord. It is ‘retrieve’, ‘not destroy’, which is one point of dissimilarity. But the group assembled matches Tolkien’s Fellowship very nearly person for person. There is a Druid, or wizard, Allanon (= Gandalf); a dwarf, Hendel (= Gimli); two youths, central characters, who take the place of the four hobbits; two elves, one more than Tolkien’s Legolas, but then one of them is called Durin, a Tolkien name; and two men, Menion and Balinor, corresponding closely (Balinor has a younger brother) to Aragorn and Boromir. Gollum is reincarnated in the person of Orl Fane, a gnome who gets possession for a time of the Sword of Shannara and tries trying to regain it. The Ringwraiths re-appear, ‘deathlike cry’ and all, as flying Skull Bearers, while the phial of Galadriel is replaced as a weapon against them by the Elfstones. As if that were not enough, the plot-outline is followed very nearly point for point as well: first journey to a ‘homely house,’ Culhaven = Rivendell; pause in a hallowed forest, Storlock = Lorien; loss of Allanon, who is dragged into a fiery pit by a Skull Bearer, just like the Bridge of Khazad-Dum (though like Gandalf he reappears); and even, ambitiously though on a very small scale, the separation of the company when the hobbit-analogues are captured and led away by orc-analogues, only to be reunited later *after the expected tracking scene). There are analogues to Sauron, Denethor, Wormtongue. The hobbit-analogues are attacked by ‘Mist Wraiths’ (like the barrow-wight), a tentacled creature in a pool (like the Watcher by Moria-gate), by a malevolent tree (Willow-man). Individual scenes are closely imitated, like the slamming down of the stone door at the end of The Two Towers, and the death and withering of Saruman, or the arrival of the Riders of Rohan on the Pelennor Fields. The similarity is so close that ibn a way it is hard to tell how good or bad the result is. Anyone who had not read The Lord of the Rings might find it highly innovative – but I doubt that many of its original readers fell into that category. What the Sword of Shannara seems to show is that many readers had developed a taste (the addiction) for heroic fantasy so strongly that if they could not get the real thing, they would would take any substitution, no matter how diluted.”