To borrow from Fawlty Towers, this guy should be on Mastermind - specialist subject: The bleeding obvious. Tolkien never made any secret of his use of ancient mythic patterns. The whole point of his work was to give Briain its own mythology, and he acknowledged that his work was patterned after the sagas and epics of other cultures, especially the Finnish Kalevala (sp?) Congrats to Prof. Wilhelm for making money by setting up seminars to tell people what they coud found out themselves by reading any halfway decent Tokien bio, or even his own "Unfinished Works", collated and edited by his son, Christopher.