Clearly Tolkien knew Beowulf well, perhaps better than anyone else of his generation, and there is no denying its seminal and definitive influence on his own work. The most obvious and inescapable parallels are those between the dragon episode in Beowulf and the similar episode in The Hobbit. The Anglo-Saxon epic, however, left its inspirational fingerprints on The Lord of the Rings in a more subtle way.
