This article attempts to assess correspondences between Richard Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen and J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings with respect to contents and conceptualization. A first part examines the analogies and differences that can be traced between the two eponymous rings of power in the tetralogy and the trilogy. A second section reads Wagner’s Oper und Drama together with Tolkien’s « On Faerie Story », exploring the question in how far Wagner’s idea of a music drama as Gesamtkunstwerk actually approaches the genre of « fantasy drama » which Tolkien believed to be impossible.
