Beowulf influenced The Lord of the Rings

Tolkien's 1936 lecture on Beowulf is still the poem's most cited piece of criticism, so this is a case of a scholar writing fiction out of the text he had spent his career on. Rohan is Anglo-Saxon England with horses. Meduseld is Heorot, down to the doorwarden who makes visitors surrender their weapons and the counsellor at the king's ear; Théoden's hall scene rewrites Beowulf's arrival almost beat for beat. The graph already holds Beowulf pointing at The Hobbit, where the theft of a cup from a sleeping dragon is lifted whole. This is the other half of the same debt.