The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers

The "Where is the horse and the rider?" poem that Theoden recites is an actual old Anglo-Saxon poem. When we're told that Saruman sometimes wanders incognito as "an old man, cloaked and hooded," it sounds very much like Tolkien is taking inspiration from his beloved Norse mythology, in which Odin does much the same; we already saw in the first movie how Saruman uses crows as his scouts or spies, just as Odin uses ravens.

No lost?