The Lord of the Rings influenced Discworld

The early Discworld books are parody, and Tolkien is the largest thing being parodied: the quest, the wizard, the reluctant small person, the dark lord whose defeat restores a king. Pratchett read The Lord of the Rings at thirteen and described it as the book that made him a reader; he also spent forty years pointing out what it had made the genre lazy about. Both halves are in Discworld, which is why the series outgrew parody: it kept asking who cleans up after the quest. Filed MEDIUM. The debt is to the whole tradition Tolkien fixed rather than to the text.