Facing Hope: The Lord of the Rings, Beowulf and the Anglo-Saxon Elegiac Tradition.

J. R. R. Tolkien dedicated much of his academic thought to Beowulf, producing what still is the major innovative and ground-breaking essay on it - 'Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics', a 1936 text which utterly changed the understanding of the poem, which he also translated into Modern English. Beowulf was likewise a main source of inspiration for his own legendarium, shaping many episodes and characters from The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. In this essay, we do not want to speak about specific episodes from The Hobbit or The Lord of the Rings influenced by Beowulf. Instead, we would like to focus how The Lord of the Rings parallels the Anglo-Saxon text in terms of what we consider one of its major themes: the cycle of life and the inevitability of death. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]