LOTR and Wheel of Time

[Alatariel]

Sword of Shannara is a definite ripoff

God, I am so glad that I'm not the only one to think this. I just read SoS for the first time about a month ago, and I was flabbergasted by all of the similarities. As has already been stated, it would be difficult to not have a couple of elements similar to Tolkien, but Terry Brooks takes it to extremes. In SoS, every time he introduced a new character, it was like he was saying "here is the Aragorn character" or "here is Gandalf - only less powerful" (since he seems to only have one spell). Like many of us here, I have read many books in the fantasy genre - including most of the Wheel of Time series - and none of them are such a blatant copy of LotR as Sword of Shannara.