Tja, hon har blivit frågad den frågan. Från Wikipedia :
Rowling maintains that she hadn't read The Hobbit until after she completed the first Harry Potter novel (though she had read The Lord of the Rings as a teenager) and that any similarities between her books and Tolkien's are "Fairly superficial. Tolkien created a whole new mythology, which I would never claim to have done. On the other hand, I think I have better jokes."
Och så finns det här citat :
"Me. I truly never sat down and thought, What do I think kids will like? I really, really was so inflamed by the idea when it came to me because I thought it would be so much fun to write. In fact, I don’t really like fantasy. It’s not so much that I don’t like it, I really haven’t read a lot of it. I have read “Lord of the Rings,” though. I read that when I was about 14. I didn’t read “The Hobbit” until I was in my 20s-much later. I’d started “Harry Potter” by then, and someone gave it to me, and I thought, Yeah, I really should read this, because people kept saying, “You’ve read ‘The Hobbit,’ obviously?” And I was saying, “Um, no.” So I thought, Well, I will, and I did, and it was wonderful. (Sheepish smile)
It didn’t occur to me for quite a while that I was writing fantasy when I’d started “Harry Potter,” because I’m a bit slow on the uptake about those things. I was so caught up in it. And I was about two thirds of the way through, and I suddenly thought, This has got unicorns in it. I’m writing fantasy!" (Jones, Malcolm. “The Return of Harry Potter,” Newsweek, 10 July, 2000)
Jag skulle behöva säga att även om hon kanske inte medvetet har tänkt någon parallell, har hon läst LoTR (som hon erkänner) är det troligt att det påverkar hennes skrivande.
Återigen, från Wikipedia:
Tolkienian scholar Tom Shippey has maintained that "no modern writer of epic fantasy has managed to escape the mark of Tolkien, no matter how hard many of them have tried."
Han gör en bra poäng; Det kan argumenteras om hon aldrig hade läst dem (även om de påverkar många andra verk som hon skulle ha koll på över det är det fortfarande tvivelaktigt), men eftersom hon medgav att hon gjorde det, tycker jag att LoTR-serien bör betraktas som påverkan för Harry Potter.