17. Tolkien based The Lord of the Rings on his knowledge of medieval literature
As much as he gave to the field of medieval literature, Tolkien also took an awful lot away for his fiction. In simple terms, Tolkien absolutely loved the tales of knights, dragons, and monsters he encountered in his professional life, and wanted to share them with the world. Even those early bedtime stories about Bilbo Baggins were inspired by old stories, and his children’s great joy at them made Tolkien realize that other people would like them if only they knew about them. The things he borrowed from medieval literature would also have appealed to his friends in The Inklings.
Even the name “Middle Earth” is a translation of the Anglo-Saxon word middangeard. Smaug, the dragon from The Hobbit, is similarly drawn from Anglo-Saxon literature. Anglo-Saxon dragons were obsessed with treasure, and spent their lives sitting on it. Their treasure-dens were either inside burial mounds or mountains. And the dragon in Beowulf burns a whole town alive because someone pinches a single cup. Sound familiar? The very plot of the whole Lord of the Rings is also heavily influenced by the late 13th-century Old Norse saga, Völsunga saga, whose plot centers around a magical and powerful ring called Andvaranaut.
