On the Hobbit trail

John Ronald Reuel Tolkien, the philologist and author of The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion, died 50 years ago in Bournemouth on 2nd September 1973, aged 81.

His wife, Edith, loved Bournemouth’s bourgeois placidity. She was tired of intellectuals, having lived in Oxford for 40 years. In 1968, when he was 76 and she 79, she persuaded him to move there.

He returned to Oxford when Edith died in 1971, but he was visiting Bournemouth to see the doctor who had treated her before her death.

It was his penultimate journey. He is buried with Edith in Wolvercote Cemetery, four miles north of Oxford. On the gravestone, the names Beren and Lúthien are engraved: characters who repeatedly appear in his most treasured works – the love tale of a man and an elf. Tolkien wrote to his son Christopher, one of his four children, ‘She was (and knew she was) my Lúthien.’

I studied at Merton College, where Tolkien was Professor of English Language and Literature from 1945 to 1959, when he was writing The Lord of the Rings. 21 Merton Street, an Edwardian block of flats – student accommodation in my day – was his final home, which seemed to me miraculous.

I have always loved Tolkien’s writing because it is and isn’t of our world.

Oxford is a doughty city, and Tolkien seemed to me a wild romantic who saw beyond and below it, and imbued the landscape with an intensity and grief the city could barely acknowledge.

At Oxford, I followed his path – he lived for a while in what looked like a blackened witch’s house opposite my lodgings in Holywell Street. I ate in the Eastgate Hotel in Merton Street, as he did in the gaudy waistcoats of

Bilbo Baggins, his small and indomitable avatar.

‘Middle-earth is our world,’ he wrote, ‘in a purely imaginary (though not impossible) period of antiquity.’ And I knew it.

This spring, I decided to follow Tolkien’s path again. I began in Sarehole, a suburb of Birmingham which was once a tiny Worcestershire hamlet. He was born not there but in what is now South Africa, where his father, Arthur, a native of Birmingham, was a banker.

The climate didn’t suit John. When he was three, his mother, Mabel, brought him and his younger brother, Hilary, to England. Arthur was to follow, but he died of rheumatic fever before he could make the journey.

According to his biographer Humphrey Carpenter, Tolkien’s only memory of his father was of his painting the name Tolkien on a travelling chest. All John’s stories are quests into the past.

Sarehole was his paradise. ‘I loved it with an intensity of love that was kind of nostalgia reversed,’ he said. He lived at 5 Gracewell Road, a semi-detached cottage, between the ages of four and eight – ‘the longest-seeming and most formative part of my life’.

The house, now on a suburban street, looks almost offensively ordinary now; when Tolkien visited in 1933, he found it ‘in the midst of a sea of new red brick’.

Here Mabel taught him languages, botany and drawing. He was bewitched by Sarehole Mill, a late-18th-century mill on the River Cole, with a large pond and a tall chimney. It’s now a museum. Browsing its archive, I found that Tolkien contributed to its renovation.

It still has an eerie peace, even though people dressed as hobbits eat pizza in the courtyard. John and Hilary would trespass and be chased away by the miller and his son, whom they called the white ogre, because he was covered in bone dust.

‘I always knew it [Sarehole] would go,’ he said – and it did, swallowed by industrialisation: the shadow.

The family moved to Birmingham so John could study at King Edward’s School. We drive past Edgbaston Waterworks tower and Perrott’s Folly, sometimes called the two towers of the second part of The Lord of the Rings – Saruman the wizard’s Orthanc and Sauron’s Cirith Ungol. John Garth, who wrote The Worlds of J R R Tolkien, the definitive guide to Tolkien and place, says there is no evidence for it.

In 1904, Mabel died of untreated diabetes; John blamed her family, who

Tolkien’s 1930s drawing of Rivendell, inspired by Lauterbrunnen, Switzerland cut off financial support when she converted to Catholicism. (He wrote that she ‘killed herself with labour’.)

He found succour in the friendship of Father Francis Morgan, the Catholic priest to whom Mabel entrusted him – he remained devout all his life – and three friends at school with whom he formed a learned society.

‘His feelings towards the rural landscape,’ wrote Humphrey Carpenter, ‘now became emotionally charged with personal bereavement.’

He began to write about hobbits, he said, ‘as a Sehnsucht [yearning] for that happy childhood that ended when I was orphaned’.

He went up to Exeter College, Oxford, and graduated with a First in English Literature and Language in 1915. He married Edith Bratt, an orphan he met when they lived in the same boarding house in Edgbaston. He joined the army and fought at the Somme, where Rob Gilson and Geoffrey Smith, two of his school friends, were killed.

‘Death can make us loathsome and helpless as individuals,’ Smith wrote to Tolkien before he died, ‘but it cannot put an end to the immortal four!’

I can’t say whether Tolkien agreed, but he began the legendarium The Silmarillion then, setting down his ‘feeling about good, evil, fair, foul in some way: to rationalise it’.

By 1925, he was Professor of AngloSaxon at Oxford, and he began to create the mythology he believed England lacked.

‘Once upon a time,’ he wrote, ‘I had a mind to make a body of … connected legend … which I could dedicate simply to: to England; to my country.’

He was close to C S Lewis, a don at Magdalen College, with whom he formed the Inklings, a society dedicated to fantasy literature which met in the Eagle and Child on St Giles’, which they called the Bird and Baby.

When the landlady installed a dartboard, which repulsed the Inklings, they moved to the Lamb & Flag – now run by a community interest company, also called the Inklings.

Lewis wrote his Narnia chronicles quickly – seven books between 1950 and 1956 – whereas The Lord of the Rings took Tolkien 12 years.

‘It is written in my life-blood,’ he wrote, ‘such as that is, thick or thin; and I can no other.’

He never finished The Silmarillion. He was a procrastinator: he made multiple drafts and could not choose a working copy. His schoolfriend Christopher Wiseman predicted why he would not finish it years before, when critiquing Tolkien’s early poetry:

‘Why these creatures live to you is because you are still creating them. When you have finished creating them, they will be as dead to you as the atoms that make our living food.’

He needed them. After Edith died, Tolkien wrote to Christopher, ‘The dreadful suffering of our childhoods, from which we rescued one another, but could not wholly heal wounds that later often proved disabling … these never touched our depths nor dimmed the memories of our youthful love. For ever we still met in the woodland glade and went hand and hand many times to escape the shadow of imminent death before our last parting.’

Those searching for Middle-earth have some certainties. Rivendell is Lauterbrunnen in Switzerland, which Tolkien visited in 1911: the resemblance in his drawings is uncanny. Helm’s Deep is Cheddar Gorge in Somerset. The Withywindle is the Cherwell.

As for the rest of it, Garth calls Tolkien’s imagination a kind of photographic double exposure, ‘the ability to visualise unreal places perfectly, and the tendency to project the world he inhabited onto one he only imagined’.

I visit the yew-flanked door at St Edward’s in Stow-on-the Wold. People say this was the inspiration for the Doors of Durin at Moria, with its holly trees.

I hope it was, but we cannot know and in that, surely, lies the possibility of magic.