Much of this world is already familiar to many of us through the novels of J. R. R. Tolkien, and the films of those novels directed by Peter Jackson. Tolkien was a professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford, and made his own translation of Beowulf in the early 1920s. Consequently, when he later came to write his famous books, he drew heavily on the poem for inspiration, reworking some of its scenes, borrowing ideas, themes and elements of plot. The people of Rohan in The Lord of the Rings, for example, are essentially Anglo-Saxons as Tolkien imagined them. Their king, Theoden, lives in a golden great
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