Tolkien and Headingley
It is not
without some little trepidation that I post this short essay to the
internet.
Doubtless I will be
sandwiched between disparaging dismissal that this thesis is a baseless fantasy
on my part, or else that it is already a commonplace which all who truly know
Tolkien or anything about his sojourn in Leeds have known since before the ark.
I claim
to be no special Tolkien scholar and I have not read even a tithe of his
posthumously published work, but I have lived in or near Headingley for close
to four decades and have developed a close feeling for the place. When my own interest in reading his works
grew earlier this year I found myself thinking more and more about how he would
have experienced the village suburb and began to try to imagine it through his
eyes, through his imagination.
This may
be a commonplace thesis which others have reached before me. If so, then I concede to them their prior
discovery. But I have done several
internet searches, and the dominant result for ‘Tolkien and Headingley’ brings
me to the blue plaque recently placed on the house in West Park in which he
lived for the last two years of his stay here, and no further.
What you
are about to read here, is at least to me, the first time that this interpretation
of his stay in the area has been stated.
It is
unpolished as I have been exploring this and writing it down as it has come to
me, but it seems to be such a secret in plain sight and so obvious an
interpretation that it might just fall out into anyone’s mind who gave it half
a moment’s thought, and so I put it out there with no further delay. This is evolving in my mind all the time and there will be more to come on this, some of which I already have in my mind.
A long
time ago I heard that Tolkien had lived in Leeds, near Woodhouse Ridge and that
some of the local features had inspired locations in his work.
As a long
term resident of Headingley, and reader of Tolkien since childhood, this
intrigued me. I instantly thought of one area that jumped out at me, but that
was as far as it went at the time. This was Woodhouse Ridge, which has always
reminded me of Ithilien, for its beautiful wooded slopes and pathway along its
side. Another detail I shall come back to seems to be in just the right place
and is wonderfully characteristic.
Last year
I reread The Hobbit for the umpteenth time, and started The Book of Lost Tales,
but it was rather hard work, and I decided that I needed to read The
Silmarillion again before I attempted it. Something that had intrigued me
however, was Tolkien’s use of the idea of the ancient city of Kôr which
curiously I had just read about in H. Rider Haggard’s ‘She’. This was one of
the most successful books of the late nineteenth century, and it was
inconceivable that Tolkien had not been aware of it, or that he had not read
it.
Whilst
there is no counterpart of Kôr in Leeds to my knowledge! it did show me how he
would take influences and use them in his work. It is also the name of the bed
of Hel, the Norse goddess of the underworld and death, but this seems more of
an influence on Haggard’s than Tolkien’s Kôr.
So I put
the Lost Tales to one side, and read lots of CS Lewis last year. Exhausting my
available resources in that department, at the beginning of this year I came
back to Tolkien, not least due to the influence of Malcolm Guite, chaplain of
Girton College, Cambridge, who had published some superb podcasts on the
Inklings and their importance to the modern world of eco spirituality, amongst
other things.
I could
put off rereading The Lord of the Rings no longer, for perhaps the dozenth time
or so, but it was over a decade since the last so it didn’t feel self
indulgent.
Tolkien and Headingley
Pt 2
I’m a bit of a Jenny come lately to Tolkien and Headingley
~ I didn’t hear about the plaque on his old house in Darnley Road, West Park
until some while after it had gone up.
I may have been a lifelong reader of Tolkien, but it is a very recent
development that I have got into the animistic side of MiddleEarth, which
combines both the ethical and eco spiritual sides.
My own interest in the mythic landscape of the local area
has taken a life of its own over the last year or so and with the focus on
protecting Headingley from a destructive bypass for an inefficient trolleybus
scheme that has developed since, I have begun to think about what Tolkien would
feel about trees that he knew on his daily journey to the University being cut
down.
The next thing of course is to think of stories where
trees are cut down; first to mind was CS Lewis’s The Last Battle where the
Calormenes are cutting down Lantern Waste which has great meaning for me, but
in Tolkien’s work it is the trees of Fangorn Forest which were being cut. A few weeks before I had observed to a
friend that the Councillors who are hell bent on destroying the most beautiful
part of Headingley had minds of metal and wheels, just like Saruman who saw
everything in terms of how he could use it and didn’t respect it for its own
intrinsic worth and beauty.
I began to think of Tolkien within this very landscape
ninety years ago, and what it must have been like then. His own vision of the land with its
mythopoeic resonances led me to the defining seed of Headingley, the Shire Oak,
which was still standing in his time. A
photograph a friend found on the web of the Oak has strengthened my intuition
that this is the seminal Treebeard.
Just as Treebeard is the chief of all the trees in
MiddleEarth, so the Shire Oak is the chief of all trees in the Shire of which
it is the centre. And so here we have
the other core feature of Headingley which I believe was an influence on his
ideas, the Shire. It is inconceivable
to me that his creation of the Shire as the starting point and foundation on
which the Hobbit is written would have no reference in it to the Shire [Oak]
that he had known a decade and more earlier.
Tolkien was, in the eyes of some, a terrible
plagiarist. All the names of the
Dwarves in The Hobbit are taken from Norse myths, and many of the themes in his
grand mythology were modelled on the archetypal characters and dynamics of the
same. King Theoden has strong
resonances of Beowulf. He openly
acknowledged all this, but did not consider it plagiarism, simply a modern
reworking of ancient and universal themes.
In Jungian terms, the dynamics of the archetypes of the collective
unconscious.
It is harder to imagine that Tolkien would not be
influenced by such numinous beings as the Shire Oak and its ancient cultural
context than to suggest that he drew on such things in his work. Having delved into his mind and grasped his
bardic vision, one can walk more fully in his world.
The Shire Oak, Headingley
Treebeard?
All his life Tolkien saw through into a mythic level of
reality where dragons flew and trees walked and talked. What more likely vision could there be for
him than the massive and ancient Shire Oak as some anthropomorphic creature,
which it did actually look like from the photograph.
Before I saw the photo (I had seen another much less
detailed previously) I mentioned to my friend about this, and his immediate
response was ‘And the Shire…’
So here we have an ancient landmark dating to the Anglo
Saxon period ~ Tolkien’s particular special subject, being Professor of Anglo
Saxon ~ which it must be inconceivable that he did not take a great interest
in, and its name is the same as the name of the home of his heroes in the
Hobbit and Lord of the Rings. Besides
which, Tolkien himself is largely a mix between a Hobbit and an Ent, if you set
aside his elvishness.
Going deeper, one must realise that Headingley in the
early 1920s was a village like suburb that was quite rural, intermingled on the
outskirts up to Beckett Park with farmland.
Even now there are still stables nearby in the Meanwood Valley.
Headingley on the Hill, a sleepy rural suburb away from
the busy city, where people liked to mind their own business and be left alone,
with a Shire Oak, rather like Hobbiton on the Hill where people like to mind
their own business and be left alone in their Shire with a large Party Tree.
Conjecture ~ perhaps.
Speculation ~ maybe. I have seen
no documentation that Tolkien made any deliberate or specific literary allusion
to these features or that they may have had some imaginative influence on his
landscapes and settings. However there
are other parallels in his life. It is
well known that the Warwickshire of his childhood was his model for Kortirion
in The Book of Lost Tales, a posthumously published compilation of early work
edited by his son Christopher. His
wartime experiences in the Battle of the Somme influenced his work deeply over
many years from stories in the Silmarillion to Frodo’s visions of long perished
warriors in the Dead Marshes.
How much would the gentle world of Headingley in the 1920s
be valued by Tolkien after the horror of the trenches? Hobbiton and the Shire have in literary
criticism been compared to wish fulfilment fantasies, almost a return to the
security of childhood. A secure place
in the mind to go to escape the post traumatic stress inflicted by the
Somme. Headingley, still perhaps
retained a ghost of the Edwardian Belle Epoque.
My mother has told me that after the Second War everyone
used to talk about ‘getting back to how it used to be before the War’. How so this must also have been the desire
following the Armistice. After a short
sojourn at Oxford working on the Dictionary his appointment at Leeds University
must have been valued as also giving him the opportunity to escape to a place
where the past still lingered. The
sleepy suburb of Headingley with its Anglo-Saxon roots and ancient trees must
have been a much appreciated discovery for him.
It has been noted on many occasions his special feeling
toward trees, which comes out again and again in his literary works. His arrival in a location where a truly
ancient tree already revered by the Anglo-Saxons was still extant must have
seemed serendipitous to him and cannot have failed to arouse his imagination.
Not that he moved immediately to Headingley. His first residence was apparently near the
University on St Mark’s Terrace, now demolished. But that was near Woodhouse Ridge, which bears a strong
resemblance to the land of Ithilien in The Two Towers. A feature which strikes me as strengthening
this link is the ginnel, a narrow stone passageway, which cuts up from the
steepest part of the Ridge and over the top to the other side. Overlooking this is an ornate building with
an oriel window that looks somewhat like a tower. The Pass of Cirith Ungol with its Tower guarding it. To Tolkien old Woodhouse nearby might well
have seemed like Mordor.
The mythic dream landscape mixes up images from daily life
and reinterprets them creating a gestalt of new meaning, allowing expression of
deeper archetypal feelings.
The half decade of stability that
Tolkien and Edith knew at Leeds after the turbulence of the war must have been
of value for a greatly needed time of healing.
Much has often be made of the
parallels between Frodo’s wound and his inability to find peace of mind back in
the Shire despite trying, and Tolkien’s own psychic wounds from the Western
Front. Headingley may not have given
him all the healing he needed, perhaps he would never find that, but like the
Shire it was somewhere he was willing to give it a try, and perhaps that is why
its resonance breaks through with some of the most innocent and benign aspects
of MiddleEarth, while even the memory of Mordor still lurks over the hill, at
the end of the pass, a memory which may not fully manifest itself, but which
stalks like a Ringwraith. What more
comforting security than the Shire, but not just the Shire, but the Shire with
Treebeard at its centre.
There are other possibilities for
seed ideas between Headingley and the Shire, but these are at the core. Treebeard, the Shire and the Shire Oak. And their importance to the evolving
symbolic expressions of Tolkien’s deepest archetypal feeling.
Perhaps one can go so far with
this that one is simply seeing the projection of one’s own desire to see the
world of MiddleEarth around one. But
given the known historical relation of Tolkien to this place, with its own
Anglo-Saxon history which must have been of interest to perhaps the greatest
Anglo-Saxon scholar of the twentieth century, it would be entirely lacking in
imagination to refuse to see the potential for inspiration presented to
him. And imagination is one thing old
Tollers had in abundance.
Many thanks and much gratitude to
Bill McKinnon for his correlation of the Shire of MiddleEarth with the Shire
Oak of Headingley when I told him of my Treebeard correlation.
© Claire Rae Randall 2 July 2013
