The Places Behind ‘The Hobbit’s’ Middle Earth

Have you ever wondered about the places which inspired J.R.R Tolkien's fictional Middle Earth?

One known location in Middle Earth is The Shire, which is home to the 'little people' in his books and in the movies called the hobbits. John Ronald Reuel Tolkien admitted in his letter to his publishers that this place was inspired "more or less" by those Warwickshire villages that used to be around in the period of Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee in 1897.

Tolkien, who was born in 1892 in South Africa and relocated to England when he was four with his family after the death of his father, said that they lived in and around Birmingham, especially at the village of Sarehole, a corn-grinding mill similar to Hobbiton.

Tolkien said with BBC news that the Shire was actually "inspired by a few cherished square miles of actual countryside at Sarehole." Today, however, the mill that Tolkien talked about is no longer in sight-what stands in its place are some of the suburbs surrounding Birmingham.

Another interesting thing in Tolkien's world are the eye-catching round doors of some of the hobbits' homes which, some people claim, were inspired by the ruins at Sydney Park in Gloucestershire.

There was an interesting story about how once, in 1929, when Tolkien served as a professor of Anglo-Saxon at the Oxford University, he visited an archaeological location known as Dwarf's Hill at the estate on the site of an ancient Roman Temple. According to these stories, Tolkien was then told of an inscribed gold ring somewhere in the ruins of the place, in a Hampshire field in 1985, which was allegedly connected to a Roman curse tablet at Dwarf's Hill. It was then believed that the author started picking the pieces from here and, a year later, he writes about The Hobbit-the story of a Halfling who finds a cursed ring.

There are many more places and elements in the books that can be associated to real life events and places in Tolkien's life. As Tolkien carefully puts it, ""an author cannot of course remain wholly unaffected by his experience..." But the way these experiences become embedded in his works are more complex than any of us can explain.