I always loved those children’s books that offered a map that folded out of the cover. The Lord of the Rings set the standard, allowing you to trace Frodo’s travels through Middle-earth to the far-off lands of Mordor. It was only as an adult that I discovered that those fantasy worlds had been very much closer to home than I’d imagined.
Like Tolkien, I grew up in Birmingham and it was a smile-inducing wonder to realise that many of the landmarks in the books were based on the geography of the author’s childhood – that the Shire itself was a recreation of the happiness of his infancy at Sarehole Mill; that the Old Forest where Tom Bombadil lived recalled Moseley Bog where the author had his childhood adventures (now preserved as a nature reserve by the Birmingham and Black Country Wildlife Trust); that the Towers of Gondor were said to be based on two distinctive structures in Edgbaston: the 100ft Gothic Perrott’s Folly and the Waterworks tower built by John Henry Chamberlain in 1870; and that the haunting Eye of Sauron was reportedly evoked by a memory of the grim weeks Tolkien spent recuperating at the university hospital from “trench fever” contracted in France in 1916, where the illuminated clock tower he could see through the window kept him awake.
