Beowulf and Bilbo

[elaby]

Aieeeee my braces are stabbing meeeee...

*puts on her geek glasses... oh, wait, wears them all the time anyway*

Don't
mind me as I digress about Beowulf and its Tolkien connections. And my
teacher spelled "Tolkien" wrong on the board! She said she doesn't know
anything about the books, and she had to be prompted to remember the
name "Two Towers." But anyway, some of you may know that Tolkien was a
big scholar of Beowulf, and according to my teacher (who, other than
that misspelling, is blazingly intelligent... she rules) he was the
first person to do critical studies of Beowulf as literature instead of
as a historical artifact. He wrote lots of stuff on it, and when I was
reading the last half of it last night I found myself staying amused by
playing "spot-the-Tolkien-reference."

There were lots.

First
of all, the society in Beowulf, the Shieldings and Geats, were very
Rohan. They had the huge benches and tables for feasts and the same
sort of drink-from-the-communal-goblet-before-battle thing. Also,
the Old English language is very much like what I gathered was Rohirric
(Rohirric? O_o) language. I only just realized, when I was reading that
yesterday, the reasoning behind the Danes being from Denmark. Like...
the Riddermark. And there was a character named Eomer. Really.

I
had something else similar that I saw... oh, there was a bit towards
the end where Beowulf fights a dragon, and the story it tells is very
similar to Bilbo's. The whole little burglar goes into big dragon's
cave and steals stuff while taunting the dragon, inciting him to emerge
from his mountain and wreck havoc on the people thing.

Er, I think that's the end of my intellectual rantings for the moment... brain activity has petered off.

I'm really liking this British Lit class, though ^_^