JRR Tolkien knew Lang's work very well and Tolkien's essay On Fairy-stories was originally presented, in an earlier version, as the (annual?) Andrew Lang Lectur

JRR Tolkien knew Lang's work very well and Tolkien's essay On Fairy-stories was originally presented, in an earlier version, as the (annual?) Andrew Lang Lecture at the University of Saint Andrews in 1939. The essay is not only an incredible work itself, but has quite a bit to say about Lang, and remember Tolkien was a leading scholar as a day job. Tolkien writes, regarding the study of myth, "Philology has been dethroned from the high place it once had in this court of inquiry." My edition's editors, Verlyn Flieger and Douglas Anderson, flesh out that story: "And Andrew Lang, as Tolkien well knew, was the man who pushed philology off its throne. Lang found and ruthlessly exposed the logical fallacies in using philological evidence to support the solar theory, turning for his own answers to another new discipline, anthropology. Lang and his supporters (like Muller he was not alone in the fight) proposed that rather than the degraded remnants of natural forces the problematic elements in the tales were the survivals of animal-worship and animistic magic. Lang's Darwinian assumption that fairy-stories were leftovers from the childhood of human development led to the corollary assumption that the tales were therefore leftover fare for human children, who would in the course of time, like the human race in general, mature into adulthood and put away childish things." Another tidbit: Lang's Green Fairy Book was published the year Tolkien was born and it contains the story, "The Enchanted Ring". In it, the young protagonist is given a ring that makes them invisible but also very powerful, if they never make bad use of it ... But such treasures of knowledge can lead us to trick ourselves: Tolkien probably didn't read the book that year (how precocious was the young JRR?) and Richard Wagner wrote Der Ring des Nibelungen - featuring a similar corrupting magic ring - before the Green Fairy Book came out. Tolkien despised Wagner, and likely all got their myths from somewhere prior.