It’s a good example of the way Tolkien layered his work – and his landscapes – with a subtle sense of history and myth, mirroring his own preoccupation with language and loss. Before them came the primitive Púkel-men. Tolkien peopled their past with the Dead Men of Dunharrow, cursed for betraying King Isildur at the end of the Second Age and doomed to live on as wraiths beneath the mountains, until Aragorn comes to redeem them. In Middle Earth, the border between the kingdoms of Rohan and Gondor is marked by the Ered Nimrais mountain range, known colloquially as the White Mountains. The search for Tolkien’s England, then, was also a search for the very things that so moved him: the last traces of lost peoples and their forgotten impress on their world. It would be a mistake to think this was divorced from Tolkien’s other aim, however: the obliteration of Anglo-Saxon and earlier cultures from English life has meant that much of what survives of these societies only does so in the woods and hills and rivers, in their names and in the folklore that surrounds them. On one level, that meant trying to reclaim what was left of pre-Conquest English language and culture and make it whole again, to create a rich and living mythology out of those scant remains that would finally redeem them from oblivion.īut on another level, that meant the landscape itself, and I decided to set out on a quest of my own to uncover Tolkien’s England and map, as far as possible, connections between Middle Earth and the countryside that he loved.

I was surprised to discover that one of the explicit aims of his work was to celebrate England. It seemed a different book, steeped in loss, shot through with a quiet dread of collective memory and its inevitable failure over long arcs of time.

Reading The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit again was a revelation.

Lord of the rings kingdoms