Who were your influences?
One strand is pulp fiction–literally, stories from the ’30s and ’40s collected into anthologies in the ’50s when I started reading SF and fantasy. Robert E. Howard in particular, then when I got to college the Tolkien trilogy in the SUI Library before the books came out in paperback.
The other strand is Latin authors and the classics more generally (though the Greek mostly in translation). I’ve got a separate section on this site on the classics, but the short version is that Tacitus and Caesar in their different ways are models for prose in any language, and the ability of some of the poets (Ovid and Juvenal spring first to mind) to handle tricky problems like continuous action and capsule description can teach any writer. They certainly taught me.