The medieval poem Beowulf and the modern fairy tale The Lord of the Rings were written centuries apart under very different circumstances, and yet they have many elements in common based on certain human needs and attitudes toward how human beings relate to the world. The unknown writer of Beowulf was part of an oral tradition that generated and handed down heroic tales that appealed directly to their society, that infused these tales with
what we would now identify as romantic elements, and that based the appeal of the stories on a worship of heroism and heroic action. J.R.R. Tolkien was a student of ancient literature who transferred ideas about virtue and heroism into a romantic structure that appealed to modern sensibilities.
There is some question about the origin of the heroic poem of Beowulf, but it is believed to have been an Anglian poem composed in Northumbria (or possibly Mercia) during the first half of the eighth century:
[The version that exists today] presupposes an aristocratic Christian audience whose Germanic background and ancestry included the knowledge of Scandinavian and all of Germanic tradition and folk-lore of which the stories of Beowulf's three battles were a part, stories which were transmitted to England during the Anglo-Saxon invasions (Hopper viii).
The poem fuses historical material such as the story of Hygelac with folk tales of monster fights, and the language has been given a Christian coloring that places the poem in the first half of the eighth century. Such heroic stories were told both as history and as a form of morality tale to encourage the heroic traits of fealty, bravery, and fierceness in subsequent generations (Irving 5-8).
Beowulf takes place in the Germanic world of the eighth century or even before. This era has been called the Heroic Age and produced a poetry to match:
Heroic poetry is apparently the product of rather special conditions, often where seminom...