New on DMR, “Victory or Valhalla! A Review of The Wanderer’s Necklace” is Brian Murphy’s appreciation of the 1914 Rider Haggard novel, later claimed as a prototype of sword & sorcery. Murphy concludes of this historical adventure novel…

it’s as good as more the more well-known and popular She … absolutely worth the read.

He perceptively notes…

Olaf [the hero], suffering alone in a cell, finds comfort in the presence of something beyond his circumstances, eternal and divine, in the stars above.

… and briefly plays this forward to reach Tolkien. Who, I can add, only read this 1914 novel in 1943, and then tut-tutted to Roger Lancelyn Green about its freewheeling attitude to historical facts and certain other things. Thus Tolkien was likely reading this novel at the right point in time, re: a possible influence on the well-known ‘Sam and the stars’ scene in The Lord of the Rings. Yet that’s not Tolkien’s inspiration, whatever the dating. Because Haggard’s scene reaches back in time — Haggard knew its original source and Tolkien would also have recognised where it came from.