False and True

J.R.R. Tolkien has not strongly been claimed by the town he lived in for most of his life.  He is one of many writers to have passed through Oxford and within the local community is certainly not the most celebrated.

Paul Fiddes suggested a reason to me when we had lunch last week.  It seems that the Oxford community was a little put off by the professor being consumed with his fictional world and not investing enough time and effort in his primary areas of scholarship.  I suspect that this is one reason why Tolkien has been widely ignored in the academy.  Enough people from Oxford are among those who make judgments of literary worth that the personal disdain among his colleagues is reflected in his lack of critical appreciation.

On the other hand, there are two places in England that are aggressively seeking to claim Tolkien and his legacy.  The first is Birmingham where four of the five blue memorial  plaques for Tolkien are placed.  Birmingham’s claim is over Tolkien’s childhood and pre-collegiate education.  They argue that many of the places in the author’s world have their genesis in actual locations in the town.

The other place is Hurst Green in the Ribble Valley.  After my visit this weekend, I am convinced that this claim is tenuous at best, yet in the tradition of myth, may be true in the larger sense of the world.

J.R.R. Tolkien did visit that can be proven without a doubt from the guest register Stonyhurst College.  He visited when his older son was finishing his training for the priesthood during WW II.  This was during the period of the writing of The Lord of The Rings.  So, Tolkien may have done some writing while visiting.  Of course The Shire had already been created long before when The Hobbit was completed in 1937.

But the marketing director of Stonyhurst saw an opportunity to exploit the Tolkien connection and began to argue that many of the expanded places in Tolkien’s later creation of Middle Earth are based on the sights, sounds and names of the places he encountered walking around the Ribble Valley.

So The Shireburn hotel which is named for an old family became the Green Dragon in Hobbiton, the Hodder River became the Brandywine river, a local forest became the Old Forest, and the guest house at Stonyhurst became the home of Tom Bombadil.

A morning program in England invited a representative from Hurst Green to debate the tourist director of Birminghm to determine who could legitimately claim to be Tolkien country.  The Ribble Valley contact refused.  His reason, Birmingham had a couple of dirty towers while all anyone had to do was come to Hurst Green and look around and they would find themselves in Middle Earth.

The folks from Hurst Green understand that myths may not stand up very well in debate, but they have the power to convince when they are experienced.