  We present the soft X-ray spectrum of the LINER galaxy M81 from a long
observation with the XMM-Newton RGS. As well as continuum emission from the
active nucleus, the spectrum shows emission lines from multi temperature
collisionally ionized gas. The emission lines are significantly broader than
the RGS point-source spectral resolution, and in the cross dispersion direction
the emission lines are detected adjacent to, as well as coincident with, the
active nucleus. This implies that they originate in a region of more than an
arcminute (~ 1 kpc) spatial extent. A good fit to the whole RGS spectrum can be
found using a model consisting of an absorbed power law from the active nucleus
and a 3 temperature thermal plasma. Two of the thermal plasma components have
temperatures of 0.18+-0.04 keV and 0.64+-0.04 keV, characteristic of the hot
interstellar medium produced by supernovae; the combined luminosity of these
two plasma components accounts for all the unresolved bulge X-ray emission seen
in the Chandra observation by Tennant et al (2001). The third component has a
higher temperature (~1.7 keV) and we propose X-ray binaries in the bulge of M81
as the most likely source of this emission.
