Lord of the Rings certainly has a Wagnerian feel, writes Alex Ross. And not just because rings are at the center of the two epics. “Tolkien refused to admit that his ring had anything to do with Wagner’s. ‘Both rings were round, and there the resemblance ceased,’ he said. But he certainly knew his Wagner, and made an informal study of ‘Die Walküre’ not long before writing the novels. The idea of the omnipotent ring must have come directly from Wagner; nothing quite like it appears in the old sagas.”