Tolkien was an Icelandophile. He taught Old Icelandic at Leeds and hired Icelandic au-pairs for his kids so he could practice the language. His project was to re-mythologize England by filling the void of story left after the Norman Invasion, and some of the handiest materials with which to do so were the sagas and Norse myths.
Some signs include...
His saga-like prose style, especially in The Silmarillion and The Children of Húrin. He even directly re-wrote the Poetic Edda, calling it The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrun.
The determinedly pagan flavor of his books’ cosmology: there’s a hierarchy of gods, they fight, there are semidivine humans running about, there’s less talk of
forgiveness than of generation-spanning blood feuds, and history ends with everything coming to ruin.
Specific items of landscape, like the way the waterfall Boromir went over is split in two by a rocky outcropping just like Gullfoss or Hjálparfoss.
Certain tics of syntax like “Theoden king,” which is how you order the words in languages derived closely from Old Norse (Icelandic is probably the closest), and more generally the Old Norse flavor of words like Theoden, which derives from þjóðann.
The country was once divided into Shire-style farthings / fjórðungur / quadrants.
The X son of Y patronymic formula; the re-use of the top 50 names, producing a lot of Magnús Magnússons; the consequent hobbit-habit upon meeting someone new of trying to establish social context by finding a shared relative.
The focus on genealogy -- in this, Mormons have nothing on Icelanders. It’s not impossible to trace back 55 generations to the settlers.
Traditional turf houses.
And Mordor.
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