Originality, in art, is overrated. This is 20th century English illustrator Arthur Rackham’s depiction of Sigurd as the hero of Die Walküre (“The Valkyrie”), the second part of Wagner’s 19th century epic Der Ring des Nibelungen, which itself derives from the 12th century German poem Nibelungenlied, which itself is either derived or created from sources parallel to the possibly-9th-and-10th-century prose Völsung saga and Poetic Edda collected in the Icelandic Codex Regius—are you still with me? Take a breath—which are originally Norse and derived at least in part from verbal traditions extant in the 5th and 6th centuries. Where we go from there, God only knows—or possibly Odin.
This is only to say, never stop writing something because someone has done it before; that is the way you become immortal.
