I have been to England twice. On both occasions I was confined to the town of merry old London, so it is with some regret I must confess I have virtually no knowledge of English geography and landscape, except what I can find in books or online.
As someone who has studied the works of J.R.R. Tolkien for many years, I have often come across claims from scholars and locals that such-and-such-a-place is the inspiration for Middle-earth, or served as the model for Middle-earth, or some connection has been observed, claimed, or otherwise inferred, fabricated, and forced into the Tolkien mythology (by which I refer to the mythology that has grown up around J.R.R. Tolkien, not his Middle-earth mythologies).
And I am in no position to discuss, disclaim, dispute, ridicule, or otherwise diminish the merits of these claims -- which probably extend into the hundreds, if not the thousands. Any writer can tell you that when we write we write from personal experience, and J.R.R. Tolkien's personal experiences took him to many places including forests in northern England, seaside resort towns, Ireland, France, Switzerland, and Italy.
The vivid imagery Tolkien infused into his stories about Middle-earth, Beleriand, and even Numenor no doubt owe a great deal to the things he saw and experienced -- which of course only renders Middle-earth more unrealistic, because it's a bit like dragging parts of northwestern Europe across the globe. One simply cannot reproduce England in Brazil, so to speak.
And Tolkien was not trying to do that. He wanted to model Middle-earth after our world so that it seemed familiar and knowable to his readers. To that extent, Tom Shippey's place-name analysis for countries like Rohan makes perfect sense. Even drawing upon such obscure items as Tolkien's work on an archaeological dig in 1929 makes a certain sense, for 10 to 15 years later Tolkien would have had those memories to draw upon.
And yet one cannot help but see a pattern emerging, a social need for mythological identification with one of England's greatest authors. Here in the United States we have seen the phenomenon develop for many of our national heroes and characters from popular folklore. Daniel Boone, Johnny Appleseed, Davy Crocket, and George Washington (to name only a few) are commemorated in many places around the country. There is no doubt those guys got around. But one has to ask how fast they traveled and how briefly they stayed in the various places that have laid some partial claim on their legacies.
Mythology is not about making up unbelievable stuff. Mythology is about remembering things that are believed. In other words, myths are not fiction -- they are explanations, memories, and resonances. The chief differences between mythology are that science is a bit more organized than mythology and mythology is a bit more stable than science. Science constantly challenges itself to question what is currently believed. Mythology is more conservative and it really is a consequence of our instinct to preserve and memorialize the things we have lost to time.
To Tolkien, a linguist, language itself must have seemed like a living mythology, preserving and memorializing things lost to time that we can barely imagine or understand now. The English language may one day be populated with random words and expressions equivalent to "Tolkien was here" -- concepts that only a philologist a thousand years from now might devine from a few scraps of paper.
I occasionally go looking for pictures and other information of places Tolkien is said to have drawn upon for inspiration, such as the Forest of Dean. There is rarely mention of these influences in the traditional biographies. Certainly he does not discuss them in the letters that have been published. And Christopher Tolkien does not clarify his father's exposition very often by mentioning places or projects from his father's youth.
The omission of references in the traditional sources in no way invalidates the claims that people put forth about Tolkien's connections with their landmarks. Rather, quite the opposite -- these omissions call for increased research and scholarship. Logical conclusions must be shared, published, and analyzed. We need to look at these things now, fifty years from now, and 500 years in the future. Before it is too late. Before they are forgotten.
For in the end it is not so important to know where exactly Tolkien got Middle-earth from -- we know it came from his heart. Rather, we have an opportunity here to look into the evolving ideas and myths that create exactly what Tolkien was trying to show us -- we have the opportunity to see the world as he must have seen it, an ever-changing landscape of memories, traditions, and claims the truth of which no one could prove or know unfailingly, but which all enrichened our collective heritage.
That is really what Middle-earth is all about, is it not? The remembering of things that have almost been forgotten -- passing on the mantle of the Story to new generations, so that the Story itself will continue rather than fade.
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