... "Somewhere" (Alcuin?) ... "Somewhere else" (Alcuin??) ... But then, "somewhere else again" (Alcuin?!?)...
It’s Friday the thirteenth. I’m going to be blamed for everything.
This idea works better if rather than saying, “
The Shire is Oxford, and
Minas Tirith is Byzantium/Rome/etc.,” we say something along the lines of, “The Shire is
like old rural Warwickshire, and Minas Tirith is
like old Byzantium.”
In the “Foreword” to
The Fellowship of the Ring,
Tolkien writes,
An author cannot of course remain wholly unaffected by his experience, but the ways in which a story-germ uses the soil of experience are extremely complex, and attempts to define the process are at best guesses from evidence that is inadequate and ambiguous. It is also false, though naturally attractive, when the lives of an author and critic have overlapped, to suppose that the movements of thought or the
events of times common to both were necessarily the most powerful influences. … [I]t has been supposed by some that “The
Scouring of the Shire” reflects the situation in England at the time when I was finishing my tale. It does not. … It has indeed some basis in experience, though slender …, and much further back. The country in which I lived in childhood was being shabbily destroyed before I was ten… Recently I saw in a paper a picture of the … once thriving corn-mill beside its pool that long ago seemed to me so important. I never liked the looks of
the Young miller, but his father,
the Old miller, had a black beard, and he was not named Sandyman.
Tolkien will refer to this description as explicitly relating the Shire to his early rural life in
Sarehole, Birmingham, England. This is in the
West Midlands, and Tolkien’s primary scholarly pursuits centered upon the history of the old Anglo-Saxon kingdom of
Mercia: He considered himself a Mercian, or at least a descendent of Mercians.
From Tolkien’s
Letter 190:
“The Shire” is based on rural England and not any other country in the world… The toponymy [study of place names] of The Shire … is a “parody” of that of rural England, in much the same sense as are its inhabitants: they go together and are meant to.
In
Letter 211 he first writes,
…I was born in 1892 and lived for my early years in “the Shire” in a pre-mechanical age.
and later,
All I can say is that, if it [
The Lord of the Rings] were “history”, it would be difficult to fit the lands and events (or “cultures”) into such evidence as we possess, archaeological or geological, concerning the nearer or remoter part of what is now called Europe; though the Shire, for instance, is expressly stated to have been in this region (I p. 12).
“(I p. 12)” refers to the “Foreword” to
The Fellowship of the Ring and is in fact the passage I first cited.
So the Shire is, more or less, an idealized version of the rural West Midlands near the end of the nineteenth century. And as an aside, Humphrey Carter, Tolkien’s biographer, quotes him as saying,
My “
Sam Gamgee” is indeed a reflection of the English soldier, of the privates and batmen I knew in the 1914 war, and recognized as so far superior to myself.
A “
batman” in this context is a soldier assigned to an officer as an orderly, aide-de-camp, or servant, as you please to take the position; and though Sam repelled down the
Emyn Muil and passed through a number of
caves, he doesn’t have a secret identity nor a sidekick named
Robin. Just to be sure, though, there really
was a man named “Sam Gamgee,” and he really did write to JRR Tolkien: he was from
Tooting in South London, which Tolkien described as “a mo[st] Hobbit-
sounding place.” (See
Letter 185. For more on this, see the essay “
Sam Gamgee and Tolkien’s batmen” by John Garth, author of
Tolkien and the Great War.)
Back to
Letter 211, where Tolkien describes the
Númenóreans as
best pictured in (say) Egyptian terms. In many ways they resembled “Egyptians” – the love of, and power to construct, the gigantic and massive. And in their great interest in ancestry and in tombs. (But not of course in “theology” : in which respect they were Hebraic and even more puritan…) I think the crown of
Gondor … was very tall, like that of Egypt, but with wings attached, not set straight back but at an angle.
In the long
Letter 131 to Milton Waldman, he compares Gondor to Byzantium:
…Gondor rises to a peak of power, almost reflecting
Númenor, and then fades slowly to decayed Middle Age, a kind of proud, venerable, but increasingly impotent Byzantium.
But
the best evidence that Tolkien had specific places in mind regarding places in Middle-earth may have emerged recently. There was
an article published in The Guardian in 2015 relating that Tolkien annotated a
map for
Pauline Baynes.
An article written about this (in French) cites “fragment 20” from the map,
Hobbiton is assumed to be approx. at the latitude of
Oxford. The
green vertical line is marked at distances of 100 miles (2 cm: acc. to map scale). So you can judge roughly climate and fauna / flora etc. Minas Tirith is
[about?] a latitude of Ravenna (but is 900 miles east of Hobbiton more near Belgrade). Bottom of the Map 1450 miles is about the latitude of Jerusalem.
Umbar City of Corsairs about that of Cyprus.
Now that doesn’t mean that the Shire
is Oxford, that Minas Tirith
is Ravenna or Belgrade, or that Umbar
is Cyprus, but that they are on the same latitudes, more or less. Here is the annotated map:
You can overlay a map of Middle-earth and a map of Europe to get various comparisons. This has been quite a game for several decades now. Here are some examples; many more can be readily found.
Wasn't King Tut discovery during the early 1900's?
I'm thinking 1912? Perhaps earlier.
1922.
