For all the Wagner buffs out there who know “The Ring” mythology didn’t begin with Tolkien, Alex Ross of The New Yorker muses over the connections between Wagner’s Ring des Nibelungen and The Lord of the Rings. Tolkien for his part denied any influence, stating “Both rings were round, and there the resemblance ceased.” But, consciously or not, the threads are there, in the cursing of the Wagnerian ring with “the lord of the ring as the slave of the ring,” in the sword that is broken and reforged, in the return of the descendant hero to fulfill a quest, and in the woman who gives up immortality for the love of a mortal man. Ross doesn’t turn his musings into a list of similarities or heavy political conjecture; the books have been around long enough for this to be a well-trod topic. After wandering through a brief music lesson and compare-and-contrast exercises, Ross ultimately aims to place Peter Jackson’s movies with music by Howard Shore in the context of opera versus film music. In film, the visuals provide the cues for the soaring score. “But in opera the music takes the lead, generating an imaginary landscape that directors and performers struggle to realize however they can.”