14. Surprisingly, he grew up in England’s industrial heartland
Given where Tolkien’s heroic hobbits live, you’d think that Tolkien grew up in some rural idyll with a village green and a cricket pitch. This picture, however, is inaccurate. After moving to Britain in 1895, Tolkien first lived in a dull suburb of Birmingham, one of the largest industrial centers in the UK. The family eventually settled in what was then the village of Sarehole, very much in the countryside but barely 4 miles from the soot-blackened centre of the city. Nonetheless, Tolkien’s experiences growing up in this strange hinterland between city and countryside directly informed his creation of Hobbiton.
Sarehole Mill (above) is the model for ‘the great mill’ in The Hobbit. Despite its close proximity to Birmingham, Sarehole still had snatches of woodland which are thought to have fired the young boy’s imagination, eventually resulting in The Old Forest of Middle Earth (though that also owes a lot to the forests of medieval literature and history). Make no mistake – Sarehole certainly wasn’t the suburbs. But Tolkien didn’t enjoy the pastoral childhood of, say, Thomas Hardy, and spent large parts of his time in Birmingham itself, where he attended King Edward’s School and served as an altar boy.
