To be fair, while there's no denying that Tolkien has exercised a tremendous (and arguably lamentable) influence on modern fantasy, he did not write in a vacuum. He had many brilliant contemporaries who either wrote before _The Hobbit_'s publication, or did so afterwards in a style that bore little resemblance to Tolkien's work. Examples include Robert Howard, Fritz Leiber, Clark Ashton Smith, C.L. Moore, Mervyn Peake, E.R. Eddison, Lord Dunsany, etc. Unlike Tolkien, they tended to create amoral universes that eschewed the Good vs. Evil paradigm that Tolkien preferred, in a manner that more and more readers today seem ready to embrace. And if they really seek the godfather of Dungeons & Dragons and _Game of Thrones_, I would recommend readers check out the works of Jack Vance, whose magic system in his seminal _The Dying Earth_ (1950) was adopted by E. Gary Gygax in D&D, and whose saga of warring feudal kingdoms in his _Lyonesse_ trilogy (1983-1989) was a much clearer inspiration for _A Song of Ice & Fire_ than _The Lord of the Rings_; in fact GRRM has often cited Vance as his favorite author. We owe Tolkien a lot, but we owe some far less celebrated authors just as much.

You left out C.S. Lewis who was a friend and contemporary of Tolkien. Tolkien also was a devout Christian and these themes are represented in his writing as well.