Would you care to expand a little bit here? I tend to think that most of the races were original.

Dwarfs, elves, trolls, goblins, and plenty others come from Norse mythology.

Orc I think was original to Tolkien, but derived from Old English for giants and ogres.

Many others, like uruk-hai and hobbit, were original.

Also, even though some of the races come from Norse mythology, Tolkien's description of them and their habits are unique (and many times quite different from the "sources").

It is worth pointing out that Tolkien was a phonologist--a linguist specializing in how words sounded--and his stated goal for the entire Middle-Earth universe was to provide a mythic backstory for England.

These two facts converge to make claims of originality very strange and difficult, because the derivations themselves are examples of original work.

I've been reading a book on Irish Mythology (Lady Gregory's compilation) and it reads a lot like LoTR

Tolkien came up with new stories and characters, but the style is similar (and of course with sources from Norse Mythology and others, that mixed and grew apart, etc)

I very much recommend Tom Shippey's Road to Middle-Earth, which discusses Tolkien's influences from the perspective of a contemporary and friend and academic colleague.

http://www.amazon.com/The-Road-Middle-Earth-Tolkien-Mytholog...

I haven't yet read Shippey's "Author of the Century", which is about a second set of influences (like the World Wars).

No. He was a philologist. Whatever… I agree with the rest of your comment.

For more background, Tolkien was heavily inspired by - among other material - a compilation of Finnish oral tradition called "Kalevala". I've read that he used to complain that the English culture lacked such a tradition which most certainly lead to what the Silmarillion, The Hobbit, The Lord of the rings and everything else.

> No. He was a philologist.

I forgot the exact term, googled the one I used, saw it was a thing, and assumed I had remembered it correctly. :( My bad.

No problem.

There's some pretty strong evidence that "hobbits" existed in prior works and tales to Tolkeins.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hobbit_(word)#Evidence_of_earli...

OED has not, even after all this time, granted him "invention" of the term, despite long inquiries into its origins.

Well, I know trolls, elves, goblins, orcs, wraiths, wargs, wizards, dragons and eagles at least were all existing notions. Some of them he popularized (e.g. "orc" and "warg" were both lost to modern usage before Tolkien brought them into currency), but he didn't invent them. I know "balrog" and "hobbit" were original, but I think most of it was a synthesis of existing mythology. Can you come up with many more original species?

Pretty sure lots of the Tolkien races come from Norse mythology.

They did (except for orcs and hobbits), but if not for LotR, they would not appear in popular fiction as they are appearing now. Besides, the comment above looks like it's disagreeing with originality of hobbits.