Tolkienian Lincolnshire

There’s no evidence Tolkien had much to do with Lincolnshire. He was a Midlander, Worcestershire, Warwickshire, Oxfordshire, not really at home in the north (for all that he was at Leeds for five years in the 1920s). Still, according to climate scientist Dr Dan Lunt, at Bristol University, the Shire is basically Lincolnshire.

Dr Dunt has trained his powerful supercomputer not at predicting the earth's future climate, but on the fictional world of Middle Earth – the backdrop for JRR Tolkien's Lord of the Rings. To reproduce Middle Earth's climate, an expert on past climate change, traced one of Tolkein's famously detailed maps, and then effectively ‘scanned’ that into the university's supercomputer. “For a model to work, all you need is a map of where continents are, and how high the mountains are,” Lunt says. The machines at the Advanced Computing Research Centre crunched the weather patterns of Rohan, Mirkwood, and the rest of Tolkien's world for about six days, or roughly 70 years in the model. According to Lunt's analysis, the climate around Mount Doom is like LA—hot, with the volcanic ash creating a similar effect to LA's infamous smog. Meanwhile the Shire, Frodo and Bilbo Baggins’ peaceful neighbourhood, is most similar to Lincolnshire in the UK.

Who could argue with that? We can be skeptical that Tolkien actually had Lincolnshire in mind when composing The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings of course, but Science has spoken.

Lincolnshire’s most famous son is Alfred Tennyson, the great Victorian poet. And it is strange to me that Tolkien, passionate about poetry, as reader and writer, doesn’t anywhere engage with Tennysonian verse. Given the part Tennyson’s Idylls of the King played in reviving Arthurian fantasy in English, and the importance of Arthurianism to aspects of Tolkien’s own legendarium, it’s a puzzle. Perhaps Tolkien did discuss Tennyson in his writing or his letters, but I haven’t been able to find any instances. Other scholars have asserted the connection: Taylor Driggers’ essay ‘Modern Medievalism and Myth: Tolkien, Tennyson, and the Quest for a Hero’ [Journal of Inklings Studies 3:2 (October 2013), 133-152] ‘considers Tennyson’s portrayal of an autonomous, evolved Arthur in Idylls of the King as a segue into the modernist context against which Tolkien wrote The Lord of the Rings.’ Work by Chris Hopkins (‘I think that Tennyson in particular has a much stronger presence in Tolkien's work than Chaucer or. Shakespeare’) and Andrew Lynch make similar cases. But there’s no specific evidence.

Here’s one Tolkienian curious detail, probably an arbitrary coincidence, conceivably something a little more significant. Tennyson himself grew up in Lincolnshire because his father was rector of the church at a place called Bag Enderby. Tennyson came out of a bag, though no bag was ever put over him.

Yes, I know: a cul-de-sac.