JR R Tolkien considered himself a Mercian – a member of an Anglo-Saxon kingdom in the middle of England. The author was born in South Africa but at the age of three moved to what was then the rural outskirts of Birmingham and developed an affinity with the wider West Midlands.
“If your first Christmas tree is a wilting eucalyptus and if you’re normally troubled by heat and sun then, just at the age when imagination is opening out, to suddenly find yourself in a quiet Warwickshire village engenders a particular love of central Midlands English countryside, based on good water, stones and elm trees and small quiet rivers, and, of course, the rustic people there,” he once wrote.
Writer John Garth, whose latest book is called Tolkien’s Mirror, sums it up: “Compared to the parched and almost treeless area where he first lived, the West Midlands must have seemed like a heightened reality to that...