With Game of Thrones coming to a close and the chances to pick creator George R.R. Martin's brain becoming ever-slimmer, we went the world premiere of Tolkien and spoke to Martin on the red carpet about the lessons he took from the iconic Lord of the Rings author's most famous work for his own best-selling Game of Thrones series.

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Comparisons between Martin and Tolkien have long been made, and with the massive success of HBO's Game of Thrones series the former's legacy as a fantasy maverick has been secured. On the red carpet for the biography of the classic author, Martin was quick to share how The Lord of the Rings influenced his work from the earliest days of writing his massively successful series."When I started writing Game of Thrones, one of the things I did was to look at Lord of the Rings and see what Tolkien did and tried to take some lessons from it. A big lesson was his handling of magic," Martin said. "You know, I think a lot of epic fantasy has too much magic. But Middle-earth is suffused with a sense of magic, it's always on the peripheral and it's used to set the stage. Gandalf is a wizard, but when Orcs attack, he draws a sword and fights them. He doesn't just magically disappear them away, like what happens in so many other stories."This particular lesson was one that shaped the world of Westeros and the way that its inhabitants interacted with all things magical and supernatural. "I knew I wanted magic in Westeros but to keep it in the background, keep it low-key and mysterious. It's not like a fake science where you mix so much batwing and so much virgin blood and you get something magic, it's not a cookbook. It's knowledge."Another key factor was the way that Tolkien built the narrative of the famed trilogy, and it was something Martin revealed that he borrowed for his popular fantasy books. "The structure was very influential on Game of Thrones. If you look at the structure of Lord of the Rings, it all begins in the Shire and it's very small. And then it gets bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger. The Fellowship starts together with the four Hobbits and then they pick up Strider -- Aragorn -- and then they get to Rivendell where they pick up more people. And for awhile they're together, but then later in the books they split apart, they separate from the two groups. Now if you look at Game of Thrones, everybody except Dany starts out in Winterfell, then certain things drive them apart, and then they're scattered all over the world."

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As much as Martin learned from Tolkien, there are places where the two fantasy titans differ. During a panel after the screening, Martin shared a pretty hilarious anecdote about one of the things that sets Tolkien apart from other writers, including himself. "Language is one of the defining characteristics of his work, and he set a very high bar for all of us other fantasists. He invented entire languages, I just fake it. When I sold Game of Thrones to HBO, they said, 'There are entire scenes here in Dothraki. Can you send us your Dothraki book and syntax and rules?' Tolkien would have responded promptly with a gigantic thing...whereas I had to say, 'I invented like eight words.'"Now that Martin is moving ever closer to the end of his own epic saga , he explained that he's not yet finished, with "two more books to write" in his A Song of Ice and Fire series. For fans desperate for an update, Martin shared that he was "working on one." And as for if Tolkien taught him anything about how to finish a story like A Song of Ice and Fire, "we'll have to see. Though the show is finishing, my books are not finishing... yet! But hopefully they will, and hopefully people will like how they finish."For more coverage, read our reviews of Tolkien and the latest episode of Game of Thrones' final season , find out what GRRM had to say about the upcoming Game of Thrones spin-offs and what Ser Davos himself revealed about the final season and get the latest on Amazon's Lord of the Ring series