That sounds familiar ...

I'm listening to the 1200 years of women composers playlist on Spotify (it's 78 hours long with lots of really great music, give it a shot).  I think my favorite composers are Alice Mary Smith (1839-1884) and Amy Beach (1867-1944).  But anyway, as I'm listening to Smith's Symphony in C Minor, I notice several fragments of phrases that sound a lot like the Hobbit themes from The Lord of the Rings.  Not an entire melodic line, but a few bars of a phrase that then weave into something different, and then a few minutes later there's another one.  Howard Shore obviously knows Smith's work, even if I've never heard of her before.  (Why, I don't know, because her work is delightful.)