Tolkien and East Yorkshire

Whilst I have never called myself a true, card-carrying, Yorkshireman, I do have an undeclared passion for Yorkshire, specifically the East Riding where I grew up. It is a place that keeps its treasures hidden, particularly its landscape, from the high rolling chalk uplands of the Wolds to the flatlands around the river Humber. Even its soft, porous coastline, as it is inexorably devoured by the sea, has buried scores of ancient settlements hidden forever beneath the waves. Something of an understated landscape, it is often overlooked by visitors in favour of its neighbours – the Dales and North York Moors – whose landscapes are at once immediately dazzling, their histories more well-known.

Yet it is a landscape that has inspired artists, poets and authors alike. When most people think of Yorkshire’s literary connections, they invariably drift to the moors of the Brontës. Indeed, if people think of East Yorkshire’s influence on literature at all it is usually the poet Philip Larkin, who ironically was so dismissive of the place that he declared that the only thing good about it was that it was flat enough to ride a bike easily.

But East Yorkshire’s most important influence on English literature, much like its landscape, is at once understated and little known. JRR Tolkien – one of the most creative and successful English writers of modern times – was inspired by the countryside around Holderness, the coastal area north-east of Hull. Its rolling fields, brooding flatlands and seascapes provided ample soil for the writer’s fertile imagination and featured in a number of tales that eventually wove themselves into the fabric of the mythology of Middle Earth.

Tolkien arrived in Holderness in the spring of 1917, as a young army officer having survived the horrors of the Battle of the Somme the previous year. Though not wounded, he had been sent home suffering from ‘trench fever’ a recurring and debilitating condition caused from the infected bites of body lice. Having been treated in Hull, he was posted to Holderness where the reserve battalion of his regiment, the Lancashire Fusiliers, formed part of Britain’s home defence system to protect against the threat of a German invasion.

Tolkien was billeted in Roos, a farming village located a few miles inland from the coast. Joined by his new wife Edith, the two would often go out together exploring the local area. In a nearby wood, known as Dents Garth, Edith danced for Tolkien “between the hemlock-leaves” (in actual fact, cow-parsley) that still grows thickly there. It was an episode that later inspired The Tale of Tinuviel, written during his time in Holderness. The story was later re-worked into The Tale of Beren & Luthien, which later featured in both the Silmarillion and The Lord of the Rings, and was one of the key tales upon which Tolkien built the world that readers would come to know as Middle Earth. In the grounds of the local church beside Dents Garth there still grows an Elm tree “so deeply cloven… that it seemed as if three shafts sprang from the ground together”, a similar tree in which Luthien is imprisoned by her father.

Local place names also worked themselves into the topography of Middle Earth. Wetwang, a village in the far north-west of the county, is mentioned in The Lord of the Rings, whilst the name ‘Ros’ (perhaps[s inspired by Roos) appears in the so-called Lost Tales as the location of a battle in which the Elves are defeated.

Local landmarks make their appearance too, most notably, Withernsea lighthouse, whose gleaming white tower can be seen from Roos and whose architecture bears a striking resemblance to sketches Tolkien drew and wanted to include in early publications of The Two Towers.

In an attempt to stave off the dull routine of army life, Tolkien began formulating and writing a number of stories and poems during his time in East Yorkshire in 1917-18. Indeed, walking the landscape around Roos today it is hard not to think of the scenic depictions of Tolkien’s Middle Earth, particularly the coastal landscapes. His poem The Horns of Ulmo, re-worked during his time in Roos from an earlier poem, one finds echoes of the geography around Holderness with its farming meadows, grey waters, rivers, streams, rocks, sea birds and thick mists rolling in off the sea:

“Only the reeds were rustling, but a mist lay on the streams / Like a sea-roke drawn far inland, like a shred of sea salt dreams”

Unsurprisingly, the sea features in a lot of these early writings. Whilst in Easington, a village on the coast near Spurn Point, he developed an early poem into The Song of Eriol, depicting a coastal landscape with its “dark bays and unknown waves I know, / The twilight capes, the misty archipelago. / And all the perilous sounds and salt wastes ‘tween this isle / Of magic and the coasts I knew a while”.

In it the sea is a both symbolic and a physical cause of change. Indeed it would be hard to think of a more appropriate place for Tolkien to develop this metaphor, for the East Yorkshire coastline is subject to some of the worst erosion in Britain, retreating by roughly one metre every year. Since the thirteenth century some thirty settlements have been lost to the sea. Even today the sea hurls up remnants of these submerged settlements, as I witnessed during my last visit when I encountered a family on the beach with plastic spades digging out a Roman amphora that had been washed up on the sands.

Ultimately, reading those early works and walking the ground around Roos today, what strikes me most is the sense of healing that one perceives in his descriptions of the landscape. It is sometimes easy to forget that when Tolkien arrived in Holderness he was a young man whose body and spirit had been shaken by his experiences of war on the Western Front. Indeed, reading the description of Sam Gamgee’s struggling through ‘The Dead Marshes’ in The Lord of the Rings you could be forgiven for thinking you were reading an eye-witness account of the fighting on the Somme. He was also a young man grieving, having lost two of his closest friends in that same battle and facing the very real prospect of his own return to face a similar fate. It is a sobering thought that as he and his new wife explored the woodlands, meadows and marshes around Holderness he was grappling with these immediate realities. What moves me most is that in his loving depictions of this landscape there is a real sense that it not only provided him with literary inspiration but also a sense of peace in a world being torn apart by war.

That is the power that this little-known part of Yorkshire has. It is a secret power, and it is why I will always love it.