Stay connected to your favorite content
Tolkien is seen as this great inventory of worldbuilding, and my man was literally just taking mythology from other places and slapping new names on it.
I'm reading a Tolkien encyclopedia (yes, I am that type of nerd), and half of his mythology is just revised Norse myth and I am here for it.
In short, don't be afraid to take the stories that have been told for centuries and revise it into something new and fresh. That is what literature is all about.