The book of the century

John Ronald Reuel Tolkien was born in South Africa in 1892 -- he viewed this detail as irrelevant, calling it a "fallacious fact" -- but came to England with his mother at age 3 and never saw his father or Africa again. He was a boy in the West Midlands as that region was being transformed from an agrarian village society to a suburban and industrial one, and that transformation and loss (privately associated, almost certainly, with the early deaths of both his parents) lie at the heart of his worldview. Tolkien's entire career, scholarly and literary, was consumed by trying to recover lost things, and what had been lost to him, on the most intimate and personal level, was his own little piece of the English countryside.

By all accounts he spent the happiest years of a poor and peripatetic childhood in the tiny hamlet of Sarehole, just outside Birmingham in rural Warwickshire. When he was 8, his beloved mother moved the family into Birmingham proper, whose grimy industrial landscape young Ronald Tolkien found hideous, so he could go to school. When he was 12, she grew desperately ill with diabetes and died, consigning Ronald and his brother, Hilary, to a dreary adolescence in boardinghouses and the homes of maiden aunts.

Of course it is overly reductive to see these sad but ordinary events as the sole source of what Tolkien's friend C.S. Lewis called the "profound melancholy" that suffuses "The Lord of the Rings." Tolkien's later experiences at the gruesome and pointless World War I battle of the Somme, for example, where two of his closest friends died, certainly cast a long shadow across the rest of his life. Still, long before the carnage in the fields of Picardy -- where 20,000 Allied soldiers died in the first day -- Tolkien felt a connection to an idyllic past that was now lost, as well as a sense that whatever beauty and wonder remained in the present was likely to pass away. (As a schoolboy in Birmingham he already had a reputation as an eccentric; he once gave a debating-society speech opposing the Norman Conquest.)

As Tolkien repeatedly made clear, the Shire, the comfortable homeland from which his hobbit heroes Bilbo and Frodo Baggins set out on their quests, is nothing more nor less than the woods and hills around Sarehole, in Warwickshire and nearby Worcestershire (where his mother's family originated). Much later, he wrote that he himself grew up "in 'the Shire' in a pre-mechanical age."

This may tell us something about how Tolkien saw himself, but it isn't literally true. The Industrial Revolution was well advanced by the time he was born, and places like Sarehole, which lay after all on the fringes of a major city, were changing rapidly. One of Tolkien's earliest memories of the area involved an old willow being chopped down, for no reason he could understand. The village mill, where wheat had been ground for more than 300 years, already ran on steam power, and had been converted to the grisly purpose of grinding bones into fertilizer.

When Tolkien returned to Sarehole with his own children, more than 30 years after leaving it, he was predictably horrified by what he found. The cottage he had lived in was lost "in the midst of a sea of new red-brick," and the lane of bluebells he remembered was "a dangerous crossing alive with motors and red lights."

It's unwise to read "The Lord of the Rings" as allegory in any strict sense, but this commonplace personal odyssey, one shared by millions in the modern age, is strikingly echoed in its plot. Frodo, the child-size hero, must leave his beloved Shire and travel into Sauron's domain of Mordor, with its slag heaps, its permanent pall of smoke, its slave-driven industries. When he returns after much danger and difficulty, he discovers that the malicious wizard Saruman -- as Shippey points out, a techno-Utopian who began with good intentions -- has industrialized the Shire itself, cutting down its trees, replacing its hobbit-holes with brick slums and factories and poisoning its rivers.

Next Page: Not an invention, but a recovered truth

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