In a Sarehole in the ground there lived a Tolkien. Not an oily, dirty, smoky hole, filled with rows of factories and a sooty smell, nor yet a muddy, lousey, foxhole with nothing in it to hide behind or to read: it was a Tolkien-hole, and that means…

What does that mean? What is it that makes a Tolkien-hole? England? God? Love? Loss? Language?

In the pantheon of modern literature, few figures cast a shadow as long as J.R.R. Tolkien. His influence on the fantasy genre is so total that most subsequent efforts, whether consciously or not, live in his shadow.

The question is: does Tolkien’s shadow darken or illuminate all it touches?

For decades, aspiring authors have attempted to replicate his epic tone — his invented languages, his maps, and his lore-laden leviathan of a world. But here’s the uncomfortable truth: unless you are Tolkien — unless you are, a devout Catholic scholar of ancient languages, a survivor of the Somme, an orphaned child of rural England touched by industrialisation, and a man who mourns the lost mythos of his homeland — you probably shouldn’t try to copy his unique approach to world-building.

Tolkien’s genius was born out of a lifelong obsession with language, myth, and morality. Tolkien’s imagined world — what he called a “secondary world” — was not the product of mere imagination, but the amalgamation of deep religious commitments, a profound love for linguistics, and a scholar’s grief over the lost legends of England. Tolkien’s life and process were so specific that to try to imitate his method without sharing his mind and experiences risks building a cathedral in a marsh made of mud.

While Tolkien's work offers a soaring standard of what fantasy can be, most writers must focus not only on world-building — on the names, languages, and maps — but on the narrative, and the interplay between world and story. And to do that, one must let story and world evolve organically, each colouring the other without building one in the absence of the other.

To write like Tolkien, you would have to be Tolkien. But most of us are not — and in that recognition lies the path to better storytelling: your own path.

In this series we will examine what it takes to begin carving out your own path, but before we do that, we will look at what exactly a Tolkien-hole means. 

We will set out on our own epic quest to try and understand why J.R.R. Tolkien’s work is so definitive — and inimitable — and to do this we must begin not with Middle-earth, but with Middle England. For every mountain, and every forest in Middle-earth is deeply rooted in the soil of his life and the soil of a half-forgotten England.

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Part 1: A Hobbit’s Tale

South Africa to Sarehole: The Seeds of the Shire

BBC’s Denys Gueroult interviewing Tolkien in 1965: “Have you a particular fondness for these comfortable homely things of life that the Shire embodies: the home and pipe and fire and bed—the homely virtues?”

J.R.R. Tolkien: “Haven’t you? [laughs]”

Gueroult: “Haven't you Professor Tolkien?”

Tolkien: “Yes, of course! Yes, yes, yes.”

John Ronald Reuel Tolkien was born in Bloemfontein, South Africa in 1892 to English parents. When he was four, his mother Mabel took him and his younger brother on a family visit to England. During the trip, his father, Arthur, died of a brain haemorrhage, caused by rheumatic fever, back in South Africa. Left suddenly a widow, Mabel chose to stay in England and raise her sons in the countryside — in the rural hamlet of Sarehole, just outside Birmingham.

Sarehole would become the model for the Shire. Its mill, its trees, and its quiet lanes — all came to form the idyllic homeland of the hobbits. Tolkien later described how deeply this landscape shaped him:

“The shire is very like the kind of world which I first became aware of things…very like. Which was perhaps more poignant to me because I wasn’t born in it. I was born in Bloemfontein South Africa. I was very young when I got back, but the same time it bites into your memory and imagination even if you don’t think it has. If your first Christmas tree is a wilting eucalyptus, and if you’re normally troubled by heat and sand, then to have, just at the age of imagination opening up, to suddenly find yourself in a quiet Warwickshire village, I think it endears a particular love of what you might call central midland English countryside, based on a good wall of stones and elm trees and small quiet rivers and so on, and of course a sort of rustic people about.”

Birmingham, or the second city of the empire — named as such due to its vast industrial output — lurked on the near horizon, an ever-growing beast, spreading its tentacles out into the countryside. In fact, when industry began creeping into the Sarehole area, bringing railways and factories to the edge of this pastoral haven, Tolkien saw it not just as a physical encroachment but as a spiritual loss. He later wrote:

“The country in which I lived in childhood was being shabbily destroyed before I was ten — in days when motor-cars were rare objects (I had never seen one) and men were rarer than sheep, and when practically every tree had a name and its individual tale.”

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Sarehole to Birmingham: The Scouring of the Shire

It is no coincidence that the scouring of the Shire — a chapter added near the end of The Lord of the Rings, and one absurdly omitted from Peter Jackson’s films — is one of the most mournful sections in the work. In it, Tolkien stages the symbolic destruction of his childhood world.

When the Hobbits return home, they find the Shire ruined — trees cut down, homes gutted, the Old Mill replaced with a belching factory, and a new authoritarian regime controlling everything from farming to beer:

“It was one of the saddest hours in their lives. The great chimney rose up before them; and as they drew near the old village across the Water, through rows of new mean houses along each side of the road, they saw the new mill in all its frowning and dirty ugliness: a great brick building straddling the stream, which it fouled with a steaming and stinking overflow. All along the Bywater Road every tree had been felled.”

This isn’t fantasy — it’s Sarehole. And it’s real. It is Middle England turned into Mordor by bureaucracy, industrialism, and greed.

It is no mistake that Tolkien wrote this chapter after the Second World War, during the rise of Attlee’s welfare state, and what he perceived as the loss of small, local, personal culture and community in favour of impersonal, centralised control. “Shirriffs” patrolling, inns closed, crops seized by officials. Tolkien was describing not just fictional loss but real a personal grief. Sarehole, the rural hamlet of his youth, had become an extension of industrial Birmingham.

A person of my age…is exactly the kind of person who has lived through one of the most quickly changing periods known to history… surely never been in seventy years so much change…The world in which I was brought up in as a small child was indefinitely closer to the world of Shakespeare.”

In short he hated it.

For Tolkien, the beauty of the countryside represented a moral goodness — a world ordered around simplicity, community, and harmony with nature. It was anti-machine, anti-Sauron, anti-fascist, even anti-progress. It was an England worth defending. And as we will find out later, it was an England that he defended in more ways than one.

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