Later, he would write: ‘Things that are uncomfortable, palpitating and even gruesome, may make a good tale.’ It was a lesson he absorbed as a teenager, discovering the Norse legends that would remain an abiding love and colour much of his published work. Of that heavy-hearted departure on the part of our affable, but not excessively bold hero, Tolkien tells us ‘there was an autumn-like mist upon the ground and the air was chill, but soon the sun rose red in the East and the mists vanished’.īilbo (Martin Freeman) surveys the Desolation of Smaug in The Hobbit film (2013).Īn aptitude for ancient and modern languages - Gothic, Finnish, Welsh, Latin, Greek and Hebrew - came to shape his own written style, as well as exposing him to compendia of stirring and dramatic storytelling. More than once, at the end of the summer, bare feet in gumboots, drinking deep draughts of sharp, pure air, I have thought of Bilbo Baggins leaving Beorn’s hall in The Hobbit.
Bracken-covered hills rise ochre, grey and green towards the sky and, in the distance, beyond broad fields of cattle, a lane bisects the landscape, winding out of sight. Sometimes, early in the morning, with a jumper or an old coat pulled over my pyjamas, I slip out of a side gate and along the drive to stare at the point where there is a bend in the valley.
Tolkien crafted a series of fantastical novels that, 50 years on from his death, still loom as large in our imagination as Sauron’s all-seeing eye, says Matthew Dennison. Country Life's Top 100 architects, builders, designers and gardenersįrom a sentence born of an exhausting teaching job, J.
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