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.
Denne historien er fra March 20, 2024-utgaven av Country Life UK.
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Denne historien er fra March 20, 2024-utgaven av Country Life UK.
Start din 7-dagers gratis prøveperiode på Magzter GOLD for å få tilgang til tusenvis av utvalgte premiumhistorier og 9000+ magasiner og aviser.
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Happiness in small things
Putting life into perspective and forces of nature in farming
Colour vision
In an eye-baffling arrangement of geometric shapes, a sinister-looking clown and a little girl, Test Card F is one of television’s most enduring images, says Rob Crossan
'Without fever there is no creation'
Three of the top 10 operas performed worldwide are by the emotionally volatile Italian composer Giacomo Puccini, who died a century ago. Henrietta Bredin explains how his colourful life influenced his melodramatic plot lines
The colour revolution
Toxic, dull or fast-fading pigments had long made it tricky for artists to paint verdant scenes, but the 19th century ushered in a viridescent explosion of waterlili
Bullace for you
The distinction between plums, damsons and bullaces is sweetly subtle, boiling down to flavour and aesthetics, but don’t eat the stones, warns John Wright
Lights, camera, action!
Three remarkable country houses, two of which have links to the film industry, the other the setting for a top-class croquet tournament, are anything but ordinary
I was on fire for you, where did you go?
In Iceland, a land with no monks or monkeys, our correspondent attempts to master the art of fishing light’ for Salmo salar, by stroking the creases and dimples of the Midfjardara river like the features of a loved one
Bravery bevond belief
A teenager on his gap year who saved a boy and his father from being savaged by a crocodile is one of a host of heroic acts celebrated in a book to mark the 250th anniversary of the Royal Humane Society, says its author Rupert Uloth
Let's get to the bottom of this
Discovering a well on your property can be viewed as a blessing or a curse, but all's well that ends well, says Deborah Nicholls-Lee, as she examines the benefits of a personal water supply
Sing on, sweet bird
An essential component of our emotional relationship with the landscape, the mellifluous song of a thrush shapes the very foundation of human happiness, notes Mark Cocker, as he takes a closer look at this diverse family of birds