Far be it to interfere with another's high dudgeon, particularly when it's you on a tear about Tolkien. But a couple quibbles: Allow me to intriduce you to my dear friend John Bauer. He was just an illustrator, true. But all he really illustrated were fairies and trolls. And he was a fuckin' rock star. When he was questioned in Italy about a murder by accident, it caused so much of a press flurry he had to cut his vacation short. And when the boat he was on capsized and killed him and his family, the wreck did a whistle-stop tour all through Sweden so everyone could see the "Ghost ship" where the fairies and trolls had their vengeance on poor mr. Bauer. The anthology he drew for, Among Gnomes and Trolls, was kind of the Saturday Evening Post. And I mean, look at this. It's 1908 and you've got Lord of the Rings, Led Zeppelin and Molly Hatchet in one watercolor. Tolkien was sixteen when this was first published. We'll also mention that Sagas were never particularly underground; for Scandinavia they were Chaucer. Hell, I had to read a few in comparative literature. Finally, Robert Howard had been making bank off of Conan the Barbarian for five years by the time The Hobbit came out. Howard's Conan was a lot more Viggo Mortensen than Schwartzenegger; Tell me this doesn't smell like Middle Earth. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conan_the_Barbarian To be clear - I got no skin in the game. I've been avoiding Moorcock for 30 years now - he was much adored by people whose tastes I distrusted when I was 11. Tolkien's influence is unquestionable and he created a lot of cool shit. But he also wasn't the only game in town. In addition, bringing myth to life -- popularizing the Kalevala and Beowulf and so on -- was a groundbreaking idea in 1937.
According to some scholars, Howard's conception of Conan and the Hyborian Age may have originated in Thomas Bulfinch's The Outline of Mythology (1913) which inspired Howard to "coalesce into a coherent whole his literary aspirations and the strong physical, autobiographical elements underlying the creation of Conan."