The Tolkien Connection
JRR Tolkien, the world-renowned author of The Lord of The Rings, saw himself as a Midlander. This is how he thought of Birmingham: “My father’s and my mother’s family were Birmingham people. I was born far away but came home in 1895, and have remained a Birmingham man ever since. The West Midlands are the best part of England”. Tolkien lived as a child in what was then the hamlet of Sarehole between 1896 and 1900 and elsewhere in Birmingham until 1911.
Looking back in old age, he described the four years at Sarehole as ‘the longest seeming and most formative part of my life”. The house in which he lived with his mother and younger brother is still there (now number 264 Wake Green Road) which is now in Springfield Ward, close by Sarehole Mill just across the road in Hall Green Ward. The Mill is now a museum in The Shire Country Park.
He writes in one of his letters, “As for knowing Sarehole Mill, it dominated my childhood.” In another he writes, “…I.. lived for my early years in ‘The Shire‘ in a pre-mechanical age.” His own description of his surroundings in Sarehole is that 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 took the idea of the hobbits from the village people and children”.
The Shire is based on the area around Sarehole Mill, The Dell and Moseley Bog (where Tolkien and his brother played as children) and the Dingles. Fortunately, a good deal of the original landscape which Tolkien saw still exists, which is why The Shire Country Park was established to conserve and interpret this unique historic area. In addition to the links with Tolkien, there are Bronze Age burnt mounds in Moseley Bog and Sarehole Mill was also once owned by famous industrialist Matthew Boulton.
In 1900 the Tolkien family moved to Moseley, then to Kings Heath, to be near the tram route for him to attend King Edward’s School, at that time in the City Centre. In 1902 they moved again to be near the Oratory Church in Edgbaston, an area which includes the ‘two towers’ of Perrott’s Folly and the Waterworks. The towers are strikingly aligned to the eye when leaving the old St Philip’s School into Plough and Harrow Road and many people are convinced that they contributed in Tolkien’s imagination to the Towers of Middle-earth.
Hall Green’s annual atmospheric Tolkien Weekend in May (this year’s event will be held on the 17th and 18th of May, email contact: GilraenBham@aol.com), with over 10,000 visitors each year is proof of the vitality of Tolkien’s legacy and how it is embedded in the community. Shire Productions (see link on first page) gives unique dramatised extracts from The Hobbit and The Lord of The Rings. Our image by Stuart Williams, ‘Forth Eorlingas’, is from an excerpt from LOTR performed in Moseley Bog. This is one reason why the Birmingham Tolkien Group (BTG), chaired by Hall Green’s Councillor Michael Wilkes, is working to establish a Tolkien Centre to commemorate the unique cultural legacy of our deep connection to JRR Tolkien, The Hobbit, The Lord of The Rings and The Shire in particular. Michael has developed a PowerPoint presentation on the proposed Tolkien Centre and The Shire Country Park that he has presented to local conservation, history and community groups.
A local author, RW (Bob) Blackham, a BTG member, has produced a richly illustrated volume ‘The Roots of Tolkien’s Middle-earth’ which sets out in fascinating detail the connections to Tolkien and the sources of Middle-earth inspiration in Birmingham. Highly recommended!
