‘The riddle of the past’: on Tolkien’s archaeological trail
By Adrián Maldonado
When I was a teenager reading The Lord of the Rings for the first time, a weird thing started happening. Whenever I had to walk any distance, I began to imagine I was embarking upon a great journey across Middle-earth. I remember when sitting around waiting for the bus one rainy afternoon, I saw a clump of bushes with a trickle of water streaming out to the gutter, and I thought, that looks exactly like the map of Fangorn and the Entwash.
I wish I could say then I got on the bus, realized I was being a dork and grew out of it. With apologies to Childish Gambino, I never got off that bus. I still haven’t.
A lifetime later, I realize I’m not alone in looking for Middle-earth everywhere. It’s not hard to find a ‘Tolkien Trail’ of some description near you, wherever you live. There’s a wild one that starts in Lancashire, where Tolkien spent a month once, and ends up in New Zealand by way of Tenerife. I’m surprised they didn’t include the North Pole, which Tolkien at least wrote stories about.
The North Pole: not on the Tolkien trail yet (source)
But I’m here to say I don’t blame anyone for flying kites about exactly which places they think inspired JRR Tolkien. Comparing someplace to The Shire is a proven strategy of getting me to go there. Just don’t expect me to believe that Tolkien really, truly based this or that chapter on your favourite country lane. The gravy train of finding Tolkien's influences very easily goes off the rails.
That’s why one of the most-used books on my Tolkien shelves is John Garth’s The Worlds of J.R.R. Tolkien (2020). After writing one of the best biographies of Tolkien, Garth has combed through the whole legendarium and then some, diving into the unpublished archive to put forward the most definitive cases for (and sometimes against) the places that really inspired Middle-earth.
New job title: auteur du blog
Recently, I had the life-changing opportunity to visit some of the real-world archaeological (and geological) inspirations as part of a new documentary film (now streaming, only in Europe so far). First of all, I agree with you, it is bonkers that I got this opportunity, and you can tell from the dumb grin on my face at every stop that I’m having the time of my life. But more importantly, going to see these places for myself, to vibe not just with the ancient past but with Tolkien’s imagination itself, reopened some questions for me. Spoiler: the questions are about archaeology.
Previously on Almost Archaeology
A blogging resumé for anyone new here: a decade ago in some of the earliest posts on this page, I jokingly referred to Gandalf as an ‘almost archaeologist’ for the research that first led him to correctly identify Bilbo’s magic ring. While working on a follow-up about Saruman, I uncovered some shocking evidence that ol' Sharkey had actually carried out legit fieldwork long before Gandalf stumbled into the library of Gondor.
Can we burn candles any closer to the ancient scrolls (source)
This productive period of avoiding essay-marking coincided with the release of the (mostly tragic) Hobbit film trilogy, and I had a great time cataloguing the archaeological themes in a trilogy of posts.
Throughout all this happy procrastination, it slowly dawned on me that Tolkien and other early fantasy writers were busy inventing new approaches to worldbuilding just as archaeologists like V. Gordon Childe were writing their own sweeping European prehistories. Studying Tolkien is actually helping me study archaeology. But can the study of archaeology help us understand Tolkien?
Chasing Tolkien
Tolkien fans have always been fascinated by the hints of the real-world sites, texts and ideas he used as inspiration, just as he always bristled at their attempts to pin him down. But I think the search encourages close reading and travel, surely no bad thing overall.
Pub pilgrimage (source)
Most Tolkien fans, if given the chance, will try and visit Oxford some time in their life, maybe have a pint at the Eagle and Child if at all possible. For us it is more than fandom, but a pilgrimage, an act of paying respect, bearing witness, and maybe also, in some ineffable way, entering the story. Searching for his real-world inspirations is no less valid than literary scholars scouring his writings for allusions to ancient texts and medieval poetry. We don’t realize we’re doing it, but collectively, Tolkien scholars and fans alike are building a new canon: the definitive set of works, things and places which provide prophetic insight into the legendarium, a sort of Tolkien Old Testament, works that, if studied and pondered, may lead to a greater understanding of the ‘sacred’ texts.
But this is, by and large, a literary pursuit. How does Garth’s Worlds of Tolkien, dealing in earthly locales, fit in with this project? It presents the authoritative argument for the way that Tolkien’s travels in the material world shaped his vision of a mythical past as much as ancient texts. It shows that inspiration is only very rarely one-to-one, but a layering of experiences, including of real-world objects and places. There’s even a chapter specifically about archaeological inspirations, but Garth, as much as I idolise him, is not an archaeologist, and there's more to build on here. As Dimitra Fimi’s work has shown, and I explored in my worldbuilding post, there is still plenty to excavate from Tolkien’s relationship to the discipline of archaeology, as both were in their formative years at the start of the last century.
The 'Dragon Hill' beneath the Uffington White Horse (own work)
One example is the fortress of Amon Sûl or Weathertop. Garth explores the possible inspiration for this particular place at the Dragon Hill ‘fort’ beneath the Uffington White Horse which he certainly visited many times. This was a bit of a reach for me, and now having been there, I am less convinced. While the site is certainly striking, it does not dominate the horizon the way I imagine Weathertop, as White Horse Hill looms right behind it. Nor does it have the look of an old, ruined castle. If anything, the older and bigger Uffington Castle, the Iron Age hillfort soaring above them both, would be a better candidate, but neither ring true for me.
Not to worry though, because this is ironically where Garth’s book shines. One of the things it does best is showing how it doesn’t really matter that there is not a one-to-one connection between places Tolkien visited and locations in Middle-earth.
In the ‘Ancient Imprints’ chapter, and in an appendix dismissing any connections to the Vyne Ring, Garth discusses the relationship between Tolkien and the prominent archaeologist Sir Mortimer Wheeler. Sure, Tolkien famously wrote a note on the god Nodens for the Wheelers' excavations at Lydney, Gloucestershire, but it is not clear that they ever met, much less that Tolkien ever visited the site. (It remains very cool that the site was known as the ‘Dwarf’s Hill’ and had Roman-era mine tunnels, but still.)
Action-packed archaeology: Sir Mortimer Wheeler (source)
Garth discusses the popular, action-packed accounts that Wheeler published in British newspapers during his excavations at Maiden Castle, Dorset Iron Age hillfort in the 1930s. It is one thing to assume Tolkien ‘must have’ read these, but Garth has the receipts (140, n. 35). He uses this to connect the Maiden Castle burial pits to the Barrow-wights, but to me, Maiden Castle, with its tales of monumental but forgotten wars, is probably more relevant to Tolkien's description of Weathertop, even if they look nothing alike. (Actually, if you really asked me, I’d say there’s nothing more Weathertop-y than Castell Dinas Brân in North Wales, even if there’s nothing connecting it with Tolkien I know of.)
Weathertop is best explained as a mix of different touchpoints ranging from Iron Age forts to medieval castles that would have bumped around in Tolkien's mind as he wrote. But if you asked him directly, he would surely dissemble – would he even be able to isolate these diffuse inspirations himself if asked?
Another important lesson from Garth’s book is that the stories grew in the telling. The way Tolkien understood Middle-earth at the outset of the Lord of the Rings writing process in 1938 changed dramatically by the time of its publication in 1954. Sticking with the example of Weathertop, Garth shows how this changed from the largely atmospheric, anonymous ‘old castles with an evil look’ seen by Bilbo in The Hobbit, to the very specific Second-Age stronghold of Amon Sûl as described by Aragorn (FotR 1, ch 9).
Tolkien’s archaeological travels
It was with Garth’s book in hand that the film crew for Tolkien: The True Story of the Rings came up with a list of key places in England, France and Switzerland to visit, and Garth is of course a prominent voice in the final film. I’m more in the role of audience surrogate, tagging along for the England leg of the journey, and I can tell you, it was a life-changer. We went to some of the places with the clearest analogues in the books, places where you can pretty much read a description on a single page, look up and see what he’s describing.
But only very few of these did Tolkien ever explicitly acknowledge. For instance, after the Battle of the Hornburg, Gimli describes in poetic detail the Glittering Caves (or Aglarond) he saw beneath Helm’s Deep.
Here they have one of the marvels of the Northern World, and what do they say of it? Caves, they say! Caves! Holes to fly in time of war, to store fodder in! My good Legolas, do you know that the caverns of Helm’s Deep are vast and beautiful? There would be an endless pilgrimage of Dwarves, merely to gaze at them, if such things were known to be. Aye indeed, they would pay pure gold for a brief glance! (TT 3, ch 8)
Tolkien’s letter 321 confirms it was the caves of Cheddar Gorge he was describing, which he had visited several times, including a heavily-freighted moment, while on honeymoon with Edith in the spring of 1916 – mere months before he marched to the Battle of the Somme.
Caves, they say! Cox's Cave, Cheddar (own work)
In most other places, the influence is not so direct. The joy of visiting these is to commune with past visitors, up to and including Tolkien, to try and feel what they felt. More often than not, that feeling is not about what you can see, but what you cannot. Visiting ancient monuments is the search for the uncanny, of seeing and touching something that has cheated time by surviving this long, and equally ruminating on how much has been lost to time’s bastard axe. For some, reflecting on past lives can create a sincere yearning to fill in those gaps by any means necessary – by consulting the archives where they exist, or by archaeological investigation where they don’t.
Wayland's Smithy, Oxfordshire (own work)
This is kind of how Tolkien felt when he read ancient poetry – it was a single enigmatic mention of ‘Éarendel’ in an Old English poem that arguably sparked the entire legendarium. But it is less well-appreciated that he got this feeling from places with evocative names and legends attached to them. Dimitra Fimi, also featured prominently in the documentary, has spotted this in Tolkien’s early academic works. In a brief stint as reviewer for scholarly journal The Year's Work in English Studies, we can see how the layering of languages in place-names fired his yearning for the ancient past. He ends his 1926 review with the potential for an “alliance of Philologia and Archaeologia.” He connects the discovery of Roman mosaics at Fawler, Oxfordshire with the origins of its place-name in the Old English fāg flōr, tessellated floor, meaning early English speakers came to this ruined villa and were struck by its multi-coloured pavement. This example immediately rung bells in his mind, as the poem Beowulf uses the phrase on fāgne flōr to describe the pavement of the mead-hall of Heorot. Tolkien would later go on to describe the king’s hall of Meduseld at Edoras as having a floor “paved with stones of many hues” (TT 3, ch. 6), creatively marrying archaeological and linguistic inspirations with allusions to medieval literature.
The Rollright Stones, Cotswolds (own work)
The ancient monuments we visited for the film, including the Rollright Stones and Wayland’s Smithy, fascinated Tolkien not just because they were ancient remnants, but also because they had acquired names and legends thousands of years after they were built. The names we still use for them derive from the early medieval period, when people reimagined them in the same way as they coined the name Fawler. Maybe he wasn’t an archaeologist, but Tolkien was able to excavate these layers of meaning from a variety of source materials from Old English literature to place-names. Tolkien's Hobbits, he imagined, were something like the Anglo-Saxons, enchanted by the spirits that still inhabited these ancient megaliths.
Tolkien the Professor
But Tolkien was not content merely to leave us wondering about these ancient monuments. A big reason for writing the Ring cycle was the chance to explore – even excavate? – in the world he had conjured to life. In a brilliant article on the archaeology of Tolkien’s world, Deborah Sabo showed how “encounters with ruins—or, to choose a more inclusive term, archaeological places—contribute to the successful evocation of a sense of history in Middle-earth” (2007, 91). The Hobbits stand in for the readers, being taken on a walking tour of Middle-earth. When Bilbo and his Party find ancient swords in the Trollshaws, they go ask Elrond how old they are and who made them, and we get our first glimpses of the antiquity of these lands. Years later when Frodo and his party find themselves at one of Bilbo’s ‘old castles’, Aragorn is there to expound on its historical significance.
We are conditioned to expect that Middle-earth has an epic history, but one that is precariously on the edge of being forgotten. This is not dissimilar to the rural England of Tolkien’s youth, with the search for British prehistory a very recent development at that point. But he was on a different kind of mission. His interest in place-names as artefacts all added to what he called in his 1926 review “the allurement of the riddle of the past” and this work as “the recapturing of fitful and tantalizing glimpses in the dark” (65). As Sabo points out, in LotR,
almost every encounter with an archaeological place springs a mnemonic trigger that brings to some character's mind a connection to the past, and a context for learning, either a deepening sense of his own heritage and identity, or sympathy for that of another…encounters with ruins and archaeological places in The Lord of the Rings always lead to personal growth. (2007, 108-9)
It is striking to go back to the big book of Tolkien’s Letters with this in mind. One of the earliest (number 7) is the cover letter he wrote to the University of Oxford when he applied to the Rawlinson and Bosworth Professorship of Anglo-Saxon in 1925, at the age of 33. He ends it with his sincere wish to continue “the encouragement of philological enthusiasm among the young.”
He of course got the job, and held that professorship for twenty years. But he'd be encouraging the youth for generations to come.
It is then no surprise the Tolkien readers are all susceptible to seeing Middle-earth everywhere. Tolkien himself trained us to peel back the layers of stories we love, and ground ourselves with roots in our own epic pasts, wherever we are.
And some of us grow up to be archaeologists.
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Featured image by me
Watch Tolkien: The True Story of the Rings on Arte.tv
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