This Is The Inspiration For The Lord Of The Rings' Middle Earth

May 2024 ยท 2 minute read

For example, the BBC reports that "The Shire was 'more or less a Warwickshire village of about the period of [Queen Victoria's] Diamond Jubilee' in 1897, according to Tolkien. And Hobbiton? "Inspired by a few cherished square miles of actual countryside at Sarehole," a Birmingham village where Tolkien spent his youth.

There is reason to believe that the series' eponymous towers had their basis in Birmingham, which features numerous notable obelisks. There are Perrott's Folly and the Waterworks Tower in the Birmingham suburb of Edgbaston, a boyhood residence of Tolkien's, and notably, an illuminated clock tower at the University of Birmingham, visible throughout the city, suggested as inspiration for the omniscient "Eye of Sauron".

Beyond Birmingham, the idea of the ring itself may have come from a 1929 experience of Tolkien's near Lydney Park in Gloucestershire. Then a professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford University, he visited an archaeological dig at the estate on the site of a Roman temple, known as Dwarf's Hill. BBC writes: "It is thought that he was then told about an inscribed gold ring found in a Hampshire field in 1785, also linked to a Roman curse tablet discovered at Dwarf's Hill. Tolkien is believed to have started writing The Hobbit, about a Halfling who finds a cursed ring, a year later."

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