WANDERER | The Profound Anglo-Saxon Poem that Tolkien Used in Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers

. Tolkien did something in the Lord of the Rings that no one else has been able to replicate. He made a fictional world that feels real. How was he able to do this? What makes him stand out among writers is that he was not a writer, first and foremost. He was a scholar—one of the truly great scholars of the Middle Ages. Most of his time was spent not writing novels but as a professor of Anglo-Saxon and English language and literature at Oxford, breaking ground in those fields, and translating numerous Medieval works including Beowulf. Hemingway once wrote that, “A good writer should know as near everything as possible.” And that was true of Tolkien, at least when it came to the Middle Ages. He had a pervasive knowledge of historical facts, cultures, and of human beings, especially of the Medieval flavor. Tolkien had a higher dosage of reality than most of us, and was therefore able to incorporate a high dose of reality into his fictional novels. There’s no better example of this than the