the zombies are woke.
Tolkien wrote a complete mythological history complete with it's own languages in order to bring back a very ancient way of looking at reality.
Tolkien was an expert on Old English literature, especially the epic poem Beowulf, and made many uses of it in The Lord of the Rings. For example, Beowulf's list of creatures, eotenas ond ylfe ond orcnéas, "ettens [giants] and elves and demon-corpses", contributed to his creation of some of the races of beings in Middle-earth, though with so little information about what elves were like, he was forced to combine scraps from all the Old English sources he could find.[3] He derived the ents from a phrase in another Old English poem, Maxims II, orþanc enta geweorc, "skilful work of ents";[4] The Tolkien scholar Tom Shippey suggests that Tolkien took the name of the tower of Orthanc (orþanc) from the same phrase, reinterpreted as "Orthanc, the ents' fortress".[5] The word occurs again in Beowulf in the phrase searonet seowed, smiþes orþancum, "[a mail-shirt, a] cunning-net sewn, by a smith's skill": Tolkien used searo in its Mercian form saru for the name of Orthanc's ruler, the wizard Saruman, incorporating the ideas of cunning and technology into Saruman's character.[6] He made use of Beowulf, too, along with other Old English sources, for many aspects of the Riders of Rohan: for instance, their land was the Mark, a version of the Mercia where he lived, in Mercian dialect Marc.[7]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._R._R._Tolkien%27s_influences