Mapping Middle Earth on Earth
JRR Tolkien’s Inspirations from England
Take a tour of the inspirational places behind the legendary stories of J.R.R. Tolkien. Contributing storyteller and Brit, William Bundy, describes a few locations on the Tolkien Trail in England. Part of the, Mapping Middle Earth series by the Fairytale Traveler.
By William Bundy
The sunlight streamed through the trees as a young woman danced in a glade filled with hemlock below. A young man watched on, his face entranced as the woman moved elegantly through the cool summer air, her hair twirling around her face as she smiled and sang for his enchantment.
The young man was on sick leave from the First World War and would spend two years of his life in this part of the world, wandering its woods, and wandering his own pen across sheets of paper that would later bear seeds of inspiration for his later works of fiction. The young man’s name was J.R.R. Tolkien, and he would go onto become one of the most famous authors in history.
Tolkien’s Trail
Tolkien was born on January 3rd, 1892, in South Africa. Growing up later on in Birmingham, he would gain inspiration for the environments of Middle Earth. Environments such as the Shire, for example, perhaps based on the Sarehole Mill in Birmingham which still exists today, and possibly the cave houses in Kinver Edge, nearby.
After meeting his future wife as a young man in Birmingham, he went to Oxford University where he studied and graduated in the English Language, before enlisting to serve in the First World War, in 1915.
Like many young men of the time, Tolkien had no idea what lay in wait for him in Northern France where the battle raged, and he soon found himself in the first great conflict of the 20th Century.
There, he lost many of his closest friends and perhaps gained a perspective on the nature of War and the impact it has on not only those who serve in it but the landscape itself, which was transformed into a blackened quagmire by the stayed stalemate of a war that seemed to have no end.