The very nature of Middle-earth

A Nature writer at heart, J. R. R. Tolkien drew on his love of the Malvern Hills and the surrounding countryside to paint his fantasy realm, says James Clarke

- James Clarke

STAND by a stream and you might just hear the gentle chatter in its rippling rhythm. Look up at a tree canopy on an autumn day and see a cathedral of colour. Stand on a hilltop and look out over fields and rivers, villages and market towns. J. R. R. Tolkien's imagination was populated by these encounters with the British landscape and he richly threaded both knowledge and memory through his work as a fantasy writer. This year, his novel The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring celebrates the 70th anniversary of its original publication, in 1954. The story is of an unassuming, home-loving character named Frodo Baggins, who agrees to undertake a perilous quest that sees him depart a pastoral landscape and venture into increasingly doom laden terrain that is mountainous and brutal.

In The Fellowship of the Ring, Nature's beauty and harmony is evermore imperilled by a growing and all-encompassing threat.

One has only to see Tolkien's watercolour of Hobbiton village, which he painted in 1937, to see how steeped his Middle-earth is in the shapes, colours and patterns of the countryside. The writer's affection for Nature ran deep and, although he chose to write a fantasy, he detailed it with attention to the colours, forms and sounds of natural and farmed places and spaces. In knitting together the real, the fantastic and the whimsical in a very British rural landscape, Tolkien was looking back in part to Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. Indeed, in Grahame's novel, the chapter entitled The Piper at the Gates of Dawn draws on the realms of myth and folklore to conjure an otherworldly, riparian adventure for Rat and Mole. Across the breadth of his work, Tolkien emerges as a Nature writer.