Novel places - Heart of England

Often described as the Heart of England, the West Midlands boasts a very high profile admirer. Although born in South Africa, JRR Tolkein considered himself a West Midlands man and even based ‘the Shire’ on a Warwickshire village and it’s easy to see why when you look at the quality of this particular region’s villages.

To Have and to Hold, A Sister's Promise, A Daughter's Secret by Anne Bennett

The Bull Ring astounded Carmel. There were women grouped around a statue, selling flowers, such a colourful and fragrant sight, though she had to shake her head at the proffered bunches for she hadn’t enough spare money to buy flowers.

The hawkers, selling all manner of things from their barrows, swept down the cobbled incline to another church that Lois told her was called St Martin-in-the-Fields, though there were precious little fields around, she noticed. It was however ringed by trees, its spire towering skyward.

Everywhere hawkers shouted out their wares, vying with the clamour of the customers. One old lady’s strident voice rose above the others. She was standing in front of Woolworths, and she was selling carrier bags and determined to let everyone know about it.  (Extract from To Have and to Hold)

Anne Bennett writes...

Birmingham is steeped in history, and in my novels I try to recreate a way of life there that is gone. For the memory of people who lived through those times, I have to get it right. Yet the city is ever-evolving. The National Arena is there, it’s home of the Royal Ballet, and we have the famous Bull Ring, mentioned in many of my books. My wise father would tell me that I should be very proud of the city because it gave him all the things in life that were important: not riches or fame, but a wife, family, a job to feed that family, free education and a house to live in. I am proud to claim this city as my own because I was fortunate enough to be born there.

More about Anne Bennett

The Hobbit, The Lord of The Rings, The Children of Hurin by JRR Tolkien

...a day came at last when they were in sight of the country where Bilbo had been born and bred, where the shapes of the land and of the trees were as well know to him as his hands and toes. Coming to a rise he could see his own Hill in the distance, and he stopped suddenly and said:

Roads goes ever ever on

Under cloud and under star,

Yet feet that wandering have gone

Turn at last to home afar.  (Extract from The Hobbit)

JRR Tolkien and the Heart of England...

Although he was born in South Africa and spent most of his life in Oxford, Tolkien felt that the West Midlands were his real home. This was the land of his Suffield ancestors. In 1955 he said: ‘I am in fact more of a Suffield (a family deriving from Evesham in Worcestershire [than a Tolkien]… I am indeed in English terms a West-midlander at home only in the counties upon the Welsh Marches.’ 

Later in 1955 he wrote his publisher that the Shire in The Lord of the Rings ‘is in fact more or less a Warwickshire village of about the time of the Diamond Jubilee [of Queen Victoria, 1897]’. He also wrote in a draft letter: ‘There is no special reference to England in the “Shire” – except of course that as an Englishman brought up in an “almost rural” village of Warwickshire on the edge of the prosperous bourgeoisie of Birmingham I take my models like anyone else – from such “life” as I know.’ (From the The J.R.R. Tolkien Companion and Guide by Christina Scull & Wayne G Hammond, 2006)

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