THE WORLDS OF JRR TOLKIEN
THE PLACES THAT INSPIRED MIDDLE-EARTH
JOHN GARTH
Frances Lincoln, 208pp, £25
‘Ostensibly it’s about the landscapes that inspired Middle-earth,’ said Tom Chivers in the Times, ‘but it’s also, unavoidably, a history of the man and his ideas.’ He went on to call the book ‘irresistible’. Elizabeth Hand in the Washington
Post agreed: ‘Tolkien’s fiction, far from being donnish fancy, was rooted in his experiences at the Battle of the Somme and observations of an irrevocably damaged world. “If Tolkien has a message,” Garth writes, “it is simple. Modern life tends to blind us to the true value of things.”
‘As with the journeys [of Bilbo and Frodo],’ Hand continued, ‘some of the most memorable passages describe hiking through wilderness. Garth recounts a nearly month-long walking tour in the Swiss Alps by Tolkien in 1911. This reveals the roots of Rivendell, the Misty Mountains, Caradhras, Dunharrow and the Dwimorberg.’ And Vanessa Thorpe in the Observer hailed ‘a key discovery’ by Garth, ‘an ancient battlescape that reappears across Tolkien’s writing. It has its basis in the earthworks at Maiden Castle in Dorset... best known to readers in the contours of the atmospheric Barrow-downs in The Lord of the Rings.’
Hand noted: ‘The palimpsest of real and imagined, ancient and modern, urban and bucolic, mythic and historic, gives Middle-earth its powerful singularity – the “tremendous sense of perspective”, as Garth puts it, so “vital in making us feel Middle-earth was not intended for the story, but existed before it”.’