[The Squatter of Amon Rûdh]

I tend to shy away from the word 'Viking', since in Old Norse (at least in Old Icelandic) it does have roughly the meaning of Mod E 'pirate', or perhaps 'freebooter'. I prefer 'Scandinavian', because it says more about the culture of the Norse settlers in England than does 'Viking'.

The Angles did indeed originate among the Geats (according to Bede and supported by references to the Geats, particularly in Beowulf). That doesn't mean, though, that the Vikings of the eighth century were there when the Angles left. Rather the two peoples descended from the same early-sixth-century people, tribes from southern Scandinavia, modern-day Holland and northern Germany. We cannot simply say that these early people were Danish just because some of them lived in what is now Denmark (or was in the late nineteenth century). When they lived there, no such thing as Denmark existed, and I might as well say that they were English because their descendents also founded Mercia and Wessex. The point is that the people you have mentioned are the very same common Germanic ancestors whom we presume to have spoken Primitive Germanic.

Anyway, it's just such an over-arching history that seems to have attracted Tolkien. He followed all the branches of Germanic, including what little Gothic we know, and seems to have tried to imagine what the legends would be like that gave rise to the stories and folklore of that can be traced throughout that linguistic family. That his writing developed far beyond this idea does not alter the debt he owes to his medieval forebears, nor the ultimate aptness of 'Middle-earth' as the stage for his fiction.