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In fantasy everyone rips off everyone else :-)
Tolkien ripped off the Kalevala, Beowulf, the Eddas--taking many of his dwarf names, Frodo, and Gandalf from them--he also lifted William Morris' "Mirkwood". Authors borrow and are inspired by other authors all the time. Anyone writing Epic Fantasy in the 70s-80s were borrowing from Tolkien with very few exceptions. Others were borrowing from Robert E. Howard, pretty much anything with a barbarian in it was Howard-like, Sword & Sorcery even made it into cartoons "He-Man".
The problem is not borrowing but making it your own, doing something different or unique with it. Shannara, the world, feels very different from Tolkien's Middle Earth, that whole world setting is the best thing about Brooks' Shannara IMO. His stories set there vary in quality, but all feel similar. The Void series is something else altogether, as is his Landover books.
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