The National Post has a new article today discussing and discecting the similarities and differences between Star Wars' Yoda and Lord of the Rings' Gollum. Here's a clip:

What's remarkable about the Tolkien tapes is the way he uses different voices for different characters. For Sam Gamgee, the devoted servant of hobbit-hero Frodo Baggins, he adopts a blustery tone. For Gollum, the withered creature who owned the One Ring before it became a Baggins family heirloom, he speaks in a raspy squawk reminiscent of a certain character from Star Wars.

"Now I know where Yoda got his voice from!" wrote one Web surfer on a message board after hearing the recorded snippets. "His Gollum is 90% Yoda," wrote another.

potential LOTR Spoilers below! Yoda, of course, is the Jedi master who instructed Luke Skywalker in the ways of the Force in 1980's The Empire Strikes Back. Many have argued that Star Wars creator George Lucas stole the idea for Yoda from Tolkien; what is obvious is that Lucas borrowed from a number of sources, and his debt to The Lord of the Rings is enormous.

The narrative structure for Empire, for example, seems directly inspired by The Two Towers, the second instalment in Tolkien's trilogy. Both Obi-Wan Kenobi (Luke's original mentor) and Gandalf the Grey (Frodo's spiritual guide) are white-bearded wizards who die, only to be resurrected in even more powerful form. The parallels go on and on.

We may never know if Lucas instructed Frank Oz, the puppeteer who operated Yoda, to mimic Tolkien's Gollum voice. But what is abundantly clear is that Gollum and Yoda have a lot in common. To suggest the two shrivelled figures are similar will infuriate many people; the immediate reaction of the typical Lord of the Rings or Star Wars fan will be to reject the hypothesis on the grounds that Gollum is clearly evil and Yoda is clearly good.

Thanks to Mike for the link!