A fascinating look at Middle-earth
THE WORLDS OF J.R.R. TOLKIEN: THE PLACES THAT INSPIRED MIDDLE-EARTH John Garth (Princeton University Press)
After months of lockdown, some of us long for another world. Readers can find one in John Garth’s The Worlds of J.R.R. Tolkien, a fascinating examination of the landscapes that inspired Tolkien’s creation of Middle-earth.
Garth is the author of Tolkien and the Great War, a seminal work that underscored how Tolkien’s fiction was rooted in his experiences at the Battle of the Somme and his observations after the First World War.
“If Tolkien has a message,” Garth writes in his new book, “it is simple. Modern life tends to blind us to the true value of things.”
As Tolkien himself put it, “If you really want to know what Middle-earth is based on, it’s my wonder and delight in the earth as it is.”
That wonder and delight seems to have begun to flourish soon after Tolkien first saw England, at the age of three. Born to English parents in what is now South Africa, his mother brought him and his younger brother to her home country for what was to have been an extended visit. A year later, Tolkien’s father, still in Africa, died, but the family remained in England.
“I loved it with an intensity of love that was a kind of nostalgia reversed,” Tolkien wrote of England in his essay On Fairy-Stories. Tolkien’s “aching love for a newfound home,” Garth writes, burgeoned into a vast creative enterprise, what Tolkien termed his legendarium. It includes not just his best-known books — The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, The Silmarillion — but numerous others.
Garth proves an exceptional guide to Middle-earth.
The first chapters are arranged according to geography and topography. The book’s last four sections explore landscapes where humankind has left its physical mark.
As with the journeys undertaken by Bilbo, Frodo and their companions, some of the most memorable passages describe hiking through the wilderness. Garth recounts a walking tour in the Swiss Alps undertaken by Tolkien and his brother, Hilary, in 1911. This Alpine sojourn reveals the roots of Rivendell, the Misty Mountains, Caradhras, Dunharrow and the Dwimorberg, places that readers have returned to and thrilled to countless times.