Could this be Tolkien's Shire? Shropshire Magazine May 2003 Original Article by Gill Guest, Photos by Danny Beath. The photos which accompany this article can be viewed at smilingleafimages.co.uk.   Is Middle Earth Middle England? Could the green and sleepy "Shire", home of the Hobbits in JRR Tolkien's classic novel, Lord of the Rings, actually be based on Shropshire? Shropshire photographer Danny Beath thinks so. “Take a close look at the map of Middle Earth and you will see an amazing resemblance to our region,” he points out. “Tolkien grew up in the Midlands and Middle Earth is based on Wales and the West Midlands. Mordor is Birmingham and Wales is the undying land to the west. The Shire is Shropshire.” Now Danny, of Shrewsbury-based Smiling Leaf Images, has taken a series of mystic and moody photographs of the Shropshire countryside to illustrate his theory, which he has presented as a series intriguing talks to photographic clubs throughout the region. I quizzed Danny about his fascination with Tolkien. “I first read Lord of the Rings during the long hot summer of 1975 when I was at school near Shrewsbury. I was a wild child who didn't fit in, a loner who wouldn't wear uniform and liked to wander in the countryside. I was always up trees! I was bullied, because I was different. I even looked different, very blond with blue eyes.” Feeling like a stranger in his own land, Lord of the Rings offered the difficult teenage Danny an alternative, but closely familiar world, where he at last felt at home. He empathised with blond elves who liked to be in trees and, wandering in Shropshire woodlands, was almost sure he could hear the whispering of an "ent moot" in progress (a council of tree shepherds, which could take months). “To me, Pistyll Rhaeadr and the Tanat Valley are Rivendell. Ironbridge is Isengard and Birmingham, Mordor. Hobbiton lies in the rolling hills around Ellesmere. Nesscliffe is the Iron Hills and the South Shropshire Hills - the Long Mynd and Stiperstones - are the Blue Mountains.” So is this merely a schoolboy fantasy or could there be a grain of truth in what Danny intuitively feels that Shropshire is the Shire? I decided to find out. Lord of the Rings is a dark, mythic tale on an epic scale, a book so long that it is published in three parts. Through it, Tolkien inadvertently founded the biggest selling and widest read of all literary forms, the fantasy genre, and had a huge influence on modern literature as well as on cinema, television and computer games. The book itself has now been adapted into a multimillion pound film trilogy, filmed not in Tolkien's beloved England, but in New Zealand. He would probably not have approved. John Ronald Reuel Tolkien was born in 1892 in South Africa, where his father was a bank clerk. When he was three, his father died, and his mother returned to England, to the small Warwickshire village of Sarehole, which has since been swallowed up by the urban sprawl of Birmingham. The transition from South Africa to England made a clear impression on the young Tolkien. In the last radio interview that he gave before his death in 1973, he said: “If your first Christmas tree is a wilting eucalyptus, and you're normally troubled by heat and sand - then, just at the age when imagination is opening out, suddenly find yourself in a quiet Warwickshire village, I think it engenders a particular love of what you might call central Midlands English countryside, based on good water, stones and elm trees and small quiet rivers and so on, and of course rustic people about.” It seems clear from this quote alone that Warwickshire had a major influence in the shaping of Middle Earth. The mill that features in both the Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings is widely believed to be Sarehole Mill and The Forest of Arden which lies between Sarehole and Stratford is considered to be the inspiration for The Old Forest, Fangorn and Lothlorien. But did other Midlands counties play a part? Unfortunately Tolkien was not usually very specific about his inspirations. Some of his letters mention that The Misty Mountains were inspired by a holiday in the Swiss Alps, and that the Cheddar caves, which he first saw on his honeymoon in 1916, were the basis of the Caverns of Helm's Deep. His own illustration of the Shire shows hedged fields and a hill rising from a plain, looking much like Bredon Hill as he would have seen it when visiting his brother's fruit farm in the Vale of Evesham. It seems fairly certain that a week walking and painting among the Neolithic and Bronze Age barrows on the Berkshire Downs during his first year as an undergraduate at Oxford contributed to his creation of the Barrow-downs. And that his involvement with the Dwarf's Hill dig at Lydney Park in Gloucestershire, run by the eminent archaeologist Sir Mortimer Wheeler, had an influence. Dwarf's Hill was riddled with Roman tunnels and open cast iron mines called Scowles and Tolkien was said to be very taken with the whole area. Although he himself admitted to having only a sketchy knowledge of archaeology, his interest in Dwarf's Hill undoubtedly stemmed from the fact that, within 20 years of the Romans leaving, the local people had grown afraid of the hill, believing the crumbling ruins to be the homes of the little people, dwarves and hobgoblins. Tolkien lived tantalisingly close to Shropshire on more than one occasion - in childhood at Rednal in Worcestershire, overlooking the Clent Hills, and during the war, at Penkridge in Staffordshire. He was also fascinated by the Welsh language from an early age, having watched coal trucks going to and from South Wales bearing exotic sounding destinations such as “Nantyglo”, “Penrhiwceiber” and “Senghenydd” from the garden of his house in King's Heath, Birmingham. While at Oxford he scandalised his peers by spending money that he was awarded as a prize for English on a book of Welsh grammar, so that he could study the language. He wrote: "Welsh is of this soil, this island, the senior language of the men of Britain and Welsh is beautiful." I find it inconceivable that, living in the West Midlands and being fascinated by Welsh he would not have visited Wales on more than one occasion. And in the process would have at least travelled through and been unavoidably influenced by, our green and rural Shropshire. As a linguist (he was a professor of Anglo-Saxon) he had more than a passing interest in place names. So it would be not altogether too fanciful to suggest that perhaps Bagginswood, south of Bridgnorth, caught his eye one day and became immortalised as the surname of the Hobbits Bilbo and Frodo Baggins. Who knows? He wrote: “I am historically minded. Middle Earth is not an imaginary world; the theatre of my tale is this earth, the one in which we now live, but the historical period is imaginary. The essentials of that abiding place are all there, so naturally it feels familiar, even if a little glorified by the enchantment of distance in time.” Tolkien distilled the essence of Middle Earth from the countryside of the West Midlands and in a sense, Danny Beath is right. His mystical and moody photographs do show Middle Earth exactly as Tolkien intended - as familiar places, glorified by enchantment.