The most well-known source to influence Tolkien’s work is the Old English poem Beowulf: apart from his famous lecture on the text (“Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics”) and his translation of it, echoes of Beowulf can be found in Tolkien’s own worke.g. Tom Shippey. The Road to Middle-Earth. HarperCollins, 2005, p. 143.. In Beowulf, horses are related to the Anglo-Saxon custom of gift giving: Hrothgar rewards Beowulf for killing Grendel and pays “for war-clashes / in horses and treasures”Beowulf. Translated by Benjamin Slade. 2005. Beowulf on Steorarume, heorot.dk/beo-intro-rede.html, ll. 1047-48., and later on, Beowulf shares these “horses and riches” with Hygelac and HygdBeowulf l. 2166.. Horses seem equal in worth to treasure. Otherwise, they would not fit in with the other extravagant giftsJennifer Neville. “Hrothgar’s Horses: Feral or Thoroughbred?” Anglo-Saxon England, vol. 35, 2006, p. 133.. Besides, what also points to their value is that gift horses could be used for many occasions, for instance to reward heroismThijs Porck. “Anglo-Saxon Gift Horses: Equine Gifts in Early Medieval England.” 14 January 2019, https://thijsporck.com/2019/01/14/anglo-saxon-gift-horses/.. Given Beowulf’s heroic deeds for Hrothgar, it is fitting that horses are part of the treasure: just as treasure symbolises the bond between a lord and his retainer in the custom of gift giving, horses symbolise generosity and are “treasures of great value exchanged to show reciprocal loyalty and gratitude”Neville, “Hrothgar’s Horses” p. 131.. By gifting horses to Beowulf, Hrothgar requests an exchange of generosity and loyalty, as the horse itself symbolises these sentiments.
Despite the many gift horses in Beowulf, white horses are only mentioned once. In line 856 of Benjamin Slade’s translation, we meet “warriors on fair steeds,” as translated from the Old English “beornas on blancum.” The notes to Slade’s translationBeowulf, heorot.dk/beo-intro-rede.html. explain that the meaning of the word “blanca”—which is only found in BeowulfShippey, Road p. 116.—was originally “bright, shining creature” and then became a poetic term meaning “white or bay horse.” Later, the word generalised to “horse.” It is striking that the Old English word used in Beowulf which eventually came to mean “horse” originally meant “white horse.” This development shows that the white horse lies at the origin of the “regular” horse. If we look at the explanation of the word “blanca” in Slade’s notes, the white horse can thus be seen as the ancestor of all horses, at least etymologically. Similarly, the Uffington White Horse can also be seen as the ancestor of a group of horses: out of Britain’s twenty-four chalk horses, the Uffington Horse is the oldest by many years and therefore the one horse that lies at the origin of all the other chalk horses.