A walk on the Barrow-Downs

[William Cloud Hicklin]

Originally Posted by Mithadan

Thank you for sharing both the pictures as well as the narrative.

Tolkien, of course, embarked upon the creation of the early versions of his Legendarium as a mythology for England. While his writings later diverged from his early goal, there is no doubt that the English countryside inspired many of his descriptions of Middle Earth's lands. Your photos seem to confirm this.

Tolkien unequivocally said that the theatre of action was "the North-west of the Old World, east of the Sea," and that the Shire lay at "the approximate latitude of Oxford;" putting both together there's no question that the Shire was England, in some mythical past, and certainly he filled it with English topography, vegetation, place-names and people.

Having said that, the rest of Middle-earth is not confined at all to English geography. The Misty Mountains, again explicitly, were modeled on the Swiss Alps- I have seen a photo of the Lauterbrunnental which from that angle is too like his Rivendell painting to be coincidence. His description of the flora of Ithilien makes it unmistakably Mediterranean (he also said Pelargir was at the latitude of Venice). And of course England has no open steppes like Rohan, either. (Neither does New Zealand).