The unique landscape of the British countryside has been replicated in literature by writers from William Shakespeare to J. K. Rowling. Indeed, last year the British Library curated an exhibition that explored literature inspired by spaces and places around the British Isles, from Penny Lane to Platform 9 ¾. Clearly, an author's surroundings can be one of the most powerful sources of inspiration.
Like many authors, Tolkien drew ideas for the places and character names in his fictional world of Middle earth from his life and the places where he lived and visited, but where exactly were these locations? Probably the first place in this list must be the little hamlet of Sarehole on the edge of Birmingham, where he lived from 1896–1900 from the ages of 4 to 8. This was a very happy time for Tolkien and in a 1966 interview in the Oxford Mail, quoted by John Ezard in the Guardian in 1991, he said that he based the Hobbits on the village people and children from Sarehole.
The place that dominated the view from the front of 5 Gracewell Cottages where he lived was Sarehole Mill and its millpond. A large brick-built mill with a tall chimney that sounds very much like Sarehole Mill appears in The Lord of the Rings, when Sam sees a vision of Hobbiton where the old mill has been pulled down and a large brick-built mill with chimney has replaced it. Tolkien's fondness for Sarehole and its mill is clear; 'It was a kind of lost paradise, there was an old mill that really did grind corn with two millers, a great big pond with swans on it, a sandpit, a wonderful dell with flowers, a few old-fashioned village houses and, further away, a stream with another mill. I always knew it would go - and it did.'
In the chapter in the third part of The Lord of the Rings, ‘The Scouring of the Shire’, when Sam and the other Hobbits return to the Shire, Sam’s vision had come true with a large mill replacing the old mill of Hobbiton.
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Across the fields behind Gracewell Cottages stood what Tolkien called ‘a wonderful dell with flowers’ (John Ezard, the Guardian, 1991); this today is called Moseley Bog and was once the main mill storage pool for Sarehole Mill, having been drained in the 1850s. This atmospheric wooded area may well have been the inspiration for The Old Forest and Fangorn in The Lord of the Rings. Furthermore Moseley Bog acted as the inspiration for Midgewater Marshes in The Lord of the Rings, which the Hobbits cross and in the process get bitten by midges, as today there are many small pools and springs where midges still breed and bite visitors in the summer and early autumn months.
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When Tolkien was living at Sarehole, he would have walked back to his Suffield grandparents’ house in Ashfield Road, King’s Heath, and would have walked up Green Hill Road in Moseley – there is a place called Green Hill Country in The Lord of the Rings. Tolkien’s Suffield grandparents later moved to Cotton Lane, Moseley, and in memory of this, he named one of the families in The Lord of the Rings Cotton: Farmer Cotton and his daughter Rose Cotton who married Sam Gamgee.
The area that Tolkien was living in when he moved to the Edgbaston/Ladywood border area, was a land of towers and chimneys, some on the skyline and others at the end of the road.. At the end of Stirling Road stands the Edgbaston Waterworks with its wonderful Italianate-style chimney, partly designed by the famous architect John H. Chamberlain. A little further away stands the beautiful eighteenth-century brick-built tower known as Perrott’s Folly, which stands 96 ft tall, and inside there is a spiral staircase of 139 steps that links a small room on each floor. The two towers in Edgbaston are locally believed to be Minas Morgul and Minus Tirith, two of the towers in The Lord of the Rings, the second book of which is entitled The Two Towers.
Another tower that Tolkien would have seen being built during his time living in Edgbaston was at the University of Birmingham. This was the 315 ft-tall Chamberlain Tower or ‘Old Joe’ as it is affectionately called after Joseph Chamberlain, the founder of the university. At night, the tower has four large illuminated clock faces, which can be seen from many parts of Birmingham and look like eyes looking at you, like the Eye of Sauron looking out from Mordor in The Lord of the Rings.
Oxford also played a part in Tolkien’s fictional world, and he said that the Ratcliffe Camera looked like Sauron’s temple to Morgoth on Númenor. The college dining halls that Tolkien dined in as a student and later as a professor would also re-emerge in his later books. With the dais platform at one end of the hall for the college professors’ high table and the students seated on forms (benches) and eating off long boards (trestle tables), they were reminiscent of Anglo-Saxon feasting halls, which were where this type of dining hall had its origins.
While on their honeymoon in Clevedon, north Somerset, in March 1916, Tolkien and his wife Edith went on a day-trip to see Cheddar Gorge and visit the caves which re-emerged as the Glittering Caves in The Lord of the Rings. Tolkien revisited the caves just before writing this passage in the book in 1940 and was somewhat surprised to find how commercialised the caves had become since his first visit almost thirty years before.
Robert S. Blackham is a member of the Birmingham Tolkien Strategy Group and vice chair of The Shire Country Park Friends, a park named to commemorate J.R.R. Tolkien’s childhood connections with the area in Birmingham. The author gives talks and lectures about Tolkien in and around Birmingham and Oxford, and has made a large number of TV and Radio appearances in connection with this. He is also the author of The J.R.R. Tolkien Miscellany.