User blog comment:Thornclaw Braveheart/Witch-king of Angmar vs. Eragon Bromsson/@comment-1728211-20111129205855/@comment-1728211-20111202093158

Making references for anything in fantasy literature is almost impossible but here goes: For the Inheritance cycle, take the monomythic archetype seen since the Epic of Gilgamesh as the start point. The "Hero With A Thousand Faces" story about the Everyman finding his destiny will, of course, bear similarities to other examples of the genre such as Dune and Star Wars, from which certain elements may be co-opted. Take the standard High Fantasy archetype. People stopped writing books directly based on Tolkien's works back in the eighties, so Paolini's book is in the third-or-fourth generation of new fantasy. Brom, for example, seems spiritually closer to Allanon, Last Druid of Shannara than he does to either Gandalf the Grey or Obi-Wan Kenobi. The very concept of "Inheritance" first turned up in the Shannara books with the Ohmsford bloodline, who always seemed to get themselves involved in world-changing events. Now, we need some cause for the hero to identify with, so let's take Anne McCaffrey's Dragonriders (she was a fan of the Cycle). We now need some magic. Le Guin's Earthsea was typically good for this but it didn't match Paolini's intentions for the use of magic in the series. Head over to Riftwar, where Pug the Magician's sorcery forms the necessary counterpoint. (Read Magician, then re-read the final battle with Galbatorix and you'll see what I mean.) Develop a language, which will of course be based on Old Norse, with most grammatical details infuriatingly being kept by the author. And now we come to the setting. While you can see every fantasy world in there if you look hard enough, the same with every fantasy map, the one that comes through most strongly is Feist's Midkemia, the setting of much of Riftwar. Look at how, for example, Crydee evolved into Teirm. That's what I mean when I say that Riftwar is the only direct inspiration. I believe that without Dune, Shannara or Pern, we would still have Inheritance in some form or another but without Riftwar, you wouldn't have been able to read any of the Inheritance books in a form even approximating to their present form.