The lord of the books

From a sentence born of an exhausting teaching job, J. R. R. Tolkien crafted a series of fantastical novels that, 50 years on from his death, still loom as large in our imagination as Sauron’s all-seeing eye, says Matthew Dennison

- Matthew Dennison

SOMETIMES, early in the morning, with a jumper or an old coat pulled over my pyjamas, I slip out of a side gate and along the drive to stare at the point where there is a bend in the valley. Bracken-covered hills rise ochre, grey and green towards the sky and, in the distance, beyond broad fields of cattle, a lane bisects the landscape, winding out of sight. More than once, at the end of the summer, bare feet in gumboots, drinking deep draughts of sharp, pure air, I have thought of Bilbo Baggins leaving Beorn’s hall in The Hobbit. Of that heavy-hearted departure on the part of our affable, but not excessively bold hero, Tolkien tells us ‘there was an autumn-like mist upon the ground and the air was chill, but soon the sun rose red in the East and the mists vanished’. In my out-of-the-way Welsh hills, early-morning mists and rose-red dawns are a familiar sight. Whether it’s true or not, I’m happy to believe the statement of an elderly local, who told me that Tolkien spent holidays in the house in which I now live, surrounded by mist-coiled hills and densely green fields that, for me, resemble the landscape of the Shire, a terrain of springs and mountain streams, even, within driving distance, ancient barrows, that also recall Tolkien’s translation of the Old English poem Beowulf, which he completed in the 1920s, a decade before Bilbo made his debut.