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JRR TOLKIEN
From Midlands to Middle-Earth

Ahead of a new exhibition dedicated to JRR Tolkien, Nancy Alsop explores the real places that inspired The Lord of the Rings author’s imaginative worlds

In author JRR Tolkien’s trilogy, The Lord of the Rings, the diminutive protagonist, Frodo Baggins, is on his quest to destroy the ring and thus save humanity. “There is no real going back,” he laments. “Though I may come to the Shire, it will not seem the same; for I shall not be the same.”

It is an onerous load for anyone to bear, let alone one so dimunative, yet he and his faithful friend Sam soldier on, their intrinsic goodness shielding them from the ring’s near irresistible temptations.

For John Ronald Reuel Tolkien, known as Ronald to his familiars, the creation of the Shire often did indeed require him to go back, at least in his mind, to plumb his memory for details of the English idyll in which he grew up. And undoubtedly he was not the same either.

Born on 3 January 1892 in South Africa to English bank manager Arthur and his wife Mabel, the young Tolkien’s early life in the Orange Free State would soon be exchanged, aged three, for the less exotic surrounds of the British Midlands. Mabel, John and his younger brother Hilary moved first, yet Arthur died unexpectedly of rheumatic fever before he was able to join them.

Left alone and without an income, the new widow did what most would and moved to be close to her parents. Thus it was that in 1896, the depleted family moved to Sarehole Mill, a Worcestershire village later annexed to Birmingham.

Tolkien fans have long suspected that the enchanting cottages, the 250-year-old watermill and the surrounding pastures acted as the author’s muse when he later created the Shire and Hobbiton, such is the charm of the area. Indeed, the author and Oxford don loved the mill so much that, when it required restoration in the 1960s, he helped to pay for the work. Today, hobbit seekers can still visit the Birmingham Museums-run site, which is open to visitors for parts of the year.

Baggins’ fictional home in Hobbiton is modelled on Tolkien’s aunt Jane’s farm, some 25 miles south of Sarehole Mill in the village of Dormston. The name, Bag End, is shared by both the real incarnation and the literary one it inspired.

While Tolkien spent his days in a quaint hamlet, nearby Birmingham remained the industrial heart of Britain, exposing the young boy to both extremes: the Arcadian fantasy and a world dominated by machinery and skylines into which great sooty plumes of smoke were routinely belched. In microcosm, such polar opposites describe the worlds of which he writes in his fiction: the exquisitely idealised and the corrupted.

As such, his childhood would also supply inspiration for the darkness of Middle-earth. Anyone familiar with trilogy of The Lord of the Rings will know that the chilling towers of Orthanc in Isengard and Barad-dur in Mordor are the utterly strange and otherworldly representations of pure evil.

For these, Tolkien was likely influenced by Perrott’s Folly, an 18th-century tower in the rather less terrifying surroundings of Edgbaston, an upmarket suburb of Birmingham, to which he moved aged 12, shortly after his mother’s death left him orphaned in 1904.

Designed by wealthy local landowner John Perrott in 1758, the folly’s original use has been much debated; some claim that he longed for views beyond the industrialising city to the green spaces beyond. More romantic accounts argue that he, in fact, wanted to see the site of his wife’s grave, which lay 15 miles away.

Following a restoration in the early 1980s, Perrott’s Folly is proudly shown to visitors to the city as inspiration for Tolkien’s imagination. Now owned by a local art collective, the much-loved landmark is occasionally opened to the public for Tolkien-related events.

Some still maintain that while Perrott’s Folly might have inspired Orthanc, it was the tower at Edgbaston Waterworks that planted the seeds in the young Tolkien’s mind that would later be used for Mordor’s Barad-dur; its industrial clanking and spluttering rendering the whole tableau chillingly sinister. The influences seen in the many hundreds of pages devoted to the astonishing worlds Tolkien created continued to be garnered long after his childhood days – most notably in Oxford, where he lived and worked for the whole of his adult life.

There are many places throughout the city of dreaming spires that are associated with the great author, ranging from Exeter College (where he studied from 1911 to 1915, before serving in the trenches in the First World War) to 13th-century Merton College, where he spent 14 years teaching English language and literature, notably Middle English, and finally to Wolvercote Cemetery, where he was buried in 1973.

Many fans have also made pilgrimages to Tolkien’s homes in Oxford, including two houses on Northmoor Road. He lived first at number 22, then at a larger house at number 20 from 1930 to 1947, during which time he wrote The Hobbit and the majority of The Lord of the Rings trilogy.

He later moved to the east Oxford suburb of Headington. There is a famous story about a particularly unwelcome guest arriving here on his doorstep in the 1960s, an American hippy who was inspired by the counter-cultural aspects of Tolkien’s books – Gandalf’s pipe-weed in particular – and demanded both a photo and to see the great writer’s pipe. He was soon sent on his way with some suitably Anglo-Saxon curses ringing in his ears.

A far more welcoming destination is The Eagle and Child pub on St Giles, a short walk from the centre of Oxford. Colloquially known as the ‘Bird and Baby’, it attracted a group of writers, including Tolkien, The Chronicles of Narnia author CS Lewis and Tolkien’s son Christopher, who were collectively known as the Inklings. The idea behind these weekly pub get-togethers during the 1930s and 1940s was to read works-in-progress aloud, and to allow their fellow scribes to critique them.

It was in this context that Tolkien began to read The Lord of the Rings to an audience, who were not always as responsive as subsequent readers have been. Lewis himself revealed that fellow Inkling and Merton College professor Hugo Dyson, bored to tears by what he saw as the repetitive elements in Tolkien’s sagas, was known to heckle: “Oh no, not another f***ing elf!” When Tolkien wasn’t teaching, writing or drinking – devoted as he was to all three pursuits – he often found time to go to Oxford Botanic Garden and Arboretum, where he would sit and reflect propped up by his favourite tree.

Once photographed in just such repose, it has since been accepted that the contorted branches of the mighty Austrian pine must surely have served as inspiration for the Ents in The Lord of the Rings, chiming uncannily as it does with his descriptions of the walking, tree-like creatures.

No Tolkien pilgrimage would be complete without a visit to the Bodleian Library, where he both worked as an academic and consulted a wide variety of ancient books and documents himself, including the 15th-century book of Welsh history, The Red Book of Hergest, which appeared in his writing, lightly fictionalised as The Red Book of Westmarch.

Here visitors can see some of his original manuscripts and artwork, which are kept in the special collections section – and never has there been a better time than this summer, when the Bodleian’s Weston Library will stage Tolkien: Maker of Middle-earth (1 June to 28 October), an exhibition set to reunite materials associated with the writer from around the world for the first time. Objects will include draft manuscripts and annotated maps, as well as several unseen artworks created by Tolkien himself and private stories he wrote to entertain his own children.

For Tolkien, it was the idea of home and the cosy world of the hobbits that most appealed to him – an inclination that accounts for his chosen surrounds being those of great beauty.

As he said of himself in a letter to writer Deborah Webster Rogers: “I am in fact a hobbit (in all but size). I like gardens, trees, and un-mechanized farmlands; I smoke a pipe, and like good plain food (unrefrigerated), but detest French cooking; I like, and even dare to wear in these dull days, ornamental waistcoats. I am fond of mushrooms (out of a field); have a very simple sense of humour (which even my appreciative critics find tiresome); I go to bed late and get up late (when possible). I do not travel much.”

Luckily for many millions of readers the world over, it would seem that Tolkien conserved his imagination for his muchloved high fantasy novels.
 

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