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J. R. R. Tolkien was an English author and philologist of ancient Germanic languages, specialising in Old English; he spent much of his career as a professor at the University of Oxford. [4] He is best known for his novels about his invented Middle-earth, The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.
After he was killed during a raid on Frisia (by a grandson of Clovis I), Hygelac was succeeded by Heardred, according to Beowulf. The raid to Frisia enabled N. F. S. Grundtvig [4] to approximate the date of Hygelac's death to c. 516, because a raid to France under a King Chlochilaicus, king of the Danes, is mentioned by Gregory of Tours.
The medievalist Marjorie Burns writes that "J.R.R. Tolkien's Middle-earth is conspicuously and intricately northern in both ancient and modern ways." [4] She cites a letter to the classics scholar Rhona Beare, where Tolkien wrote that he had not invented the name "Middle-earth", as it had come from "inhabitants of Northwestern Europe, Scandinavia, and England".
Middle-earth is strongly influenced by the Old English poem Beowulf. Tolkien made extensive use of the poem in his Middle-earth writings, not least for his boldly Anglo-Saxon Riders of Rohan. One aspect of paganism, the Northern courage so prominent in Beowulf, [T 7] appears as a central virtue in The Lord of the Rings.
The commentary, occupying over 200 pages, provides a detailed picture of how he saw Beowulf, sometimes taking several pages for a short passage of the poem, and giving his interpretation of difficult words or allusions by the poet. The commentary formed the basis of Tolkien's acclaimed 1936 lecture "Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics". [1] [2]
His professional knowledge of Beowulf, telling of a pagan world but with a Christian narrator, [2] helped to shape his fictional world of Middle-earth. His intention to create what has been called "a mythology for England" [T 2] led him to construct not only stories but a fully-formed world, Middle-earth, with languages, peoples, cultures, and ...
Middle-earth is the setting of much of the English writer J. R. R. Tolkien's fantasy. The term is equivalent to the Miðgarðr of Norse mythology and Middangeard in Old English works, including Beowulf. Middle-earth is the oecumene (i.e. the human-inhabited world, or the central continent of Earth) in Tolkien's imagined mythological past.
Among the many influences of philology on his Middle-earth writings, Tolkien's visit to the temple of Nodens at a place called "Dwarf's Hill" and the subsequent philological study of an inscription with a curse upon a ring that he conducted, may have been seminal, inspiring his Dwarves, Mines of Moria, Rings of Power, and Celebrimbor "Silver-Hand", an Elven-smith who contributed to Moria's ...