The Tolkien Connection

The upcoming release of the first of Peter Jackson’s films based on The Hobbit gives an opportunity to emphasize, once again, how fortunate Birmingham is to have such a close association with its world-renowned author and how we should make more of this connection.
J.R.R. Tolkien 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 (now part of Birmingham) 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) just across the road from Sarehole Mill. The Mill was the inspiration for the mill in Hobbiton and is now a most interesting museum in The Shire Country Park.
In one of his letters Tolkien writes: “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, The Dingles and Moseley Bog where Tolkien and his brother Hilary often played as children. It is fortunate that 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 park’s links with Tolkien, there are Bronze Age burnt mounds in Moseley Bog and Sarehole Mill was also once owned by the famous industrialist Matthew Boulton.
In 1900 the Tolkien family moved to Moseley and then to Kings Heath to be closer to the tram route for him to attend King Edward’s School, at that time located in the City Centre in New Street. In 1902 they moved again to be near to the Oratory Church in Edgbaston, an area which includes the ‘Two Towers’ of Perrott’s Folly and the Italianate Waterworks chimney. The towers are strikingly aligned to the eye when leaving the old St Philip’s School (which Tolkien also attended) 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 Middle-earth Weekend takes place in May and attracts over 10,000 visitors each year – proof, if it was needed, of the vitality of Tolkien’s legacy and how it is embedded in the community. Shire Productions gives unique dramatised extracts from The Hobbit and The Lord of The Rings with the next event on 8th and 9th December as detailed in the previous posting.