Tolkein’s Mordor: Black Magic in the Black Country
By Patrick Low
Rivendell in Rugeley? Saruman in Sarehole? Boromir in Brierley Hill? For those of you who are thinking that the previous sentence may as well have been in Elvish, then let me explain.
Amidst all the recent brouhaha surrounding Harry Potter and everything mystical, it would appear that the Black Countries’ magical heritage may have been shamefully overlooked. “Magic in the Midlands?” I hear you cry, “Surely not.” Well, according to some, the Black Country may have been the key inspiration for much of J.R.R Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. Having been brought up in Sarehole, it is rumoured that much of his inspiration for Middle Earth and all things hobbit-like were shaped by his industrial surroundings.
In order to see for myself what landscape looked like, I took a trip to the Black Country Living Museum that houses, amongst other things, a publicly accessible mine shaft wherein I began to see the connections. So sit back, relax, but don’t drop your guard too much, as I take you on a potentially perilous journey from the Midlands into the depths of Middle Earth; first stop, the Mines of Moria.
At this moment, to pinch a Jamiroquai lyric, ‘I’m going deeper underground.’ In fact, I am blindly traipsing further and further into a jet blackness of such totality that it appears to engulf me. The air is sour and stale, and the ceilings are so low that I am bent double so as not to knock my head. This mine shaft is fit for hobbits, not humans. The low ceilings are a constant peril. In these lightless surroundings my eyes begin to play tricks on me. The pitch black, ‘thick coal’ walls, a variant of coal unique to the Black Country, loom ominously.
In the brief flickers of light or flitting movements of others around me, I begin to catch shapes and images on the walls. One minute, a haggard, wearied face, the next a menacing grimace. At every twist and turn, the eyes glimpse a new devilry. I think I am beginning to understand what Gandalf meant In the Lord of the Rings, when he speaks of the mines of Moria as harbouring “shadows in the darkness.”
Leaving the mine and travelling around the relics of industrial production that pepper the Black Country landscape, I see further inspiration for Tolkien’s Middle Earth. The heavy machinery, the iron work yards, the now ashen cold fires of the long disbanded steel forge, all resonate through Lord of the Rings. Tolkien’s tale is of a ring forged in the fires of middle earth, a location which is populated by dwarfs and elves all famous for their own variants of steel and iron.
Having been born at the turn of the 19th century, Tolkien would have been surrounded by the machinery of the steel and iron industries that made the Black Country such a central part of the Industrial Revolution. What’s more, he was an ardent lover of nature and had an acute distaste for the grime, soot and smoke of industry. Nowhere is this more apparent than in his depiction of the habitats of the good and evil forces in Middle Earth.
Frodo, the hobbits and the elves all live in glorious green pastures, surrounded by rolling hills, luscious valleys and crystal clear streams and rivers. The Orcs, however, emerge from underneath the earth’s surface, into a world of fire and darkness. Could this be the same fire and darkness noted by a resident Black Country poet, who said:
When Satan stood on Brierley Hill
And far around him gazed,
He said: "I never more shall feel
At Hells fierce flames amazed."
My final stop on this journey is Mordor, the land of the evil Saruman. Known as the ‘black land,’ Mordor is a place where light falls “fruitless down into the dust.” Like the ‘black land,’ the Black Country, according to the American consul in Birmingham in 1868, was a place “black by day and red by night.” Indeed, it is rumoured that the Black Country got its name because of the pollution from heavy industries that covered the area in black soot.
In a similar vein, all who reside in Mordor speak variations of ‘black speech.’ This ‘black speech’ is just one of many different languages Tolkien created in writing Lord of the Rings. As a result of having taught philology at Oxford, his fascination with ancient languages runs through the heart of his fantasy epics. Could this fascination have arisen from being a Black Country resident? For it cannot have gone unnoticed that the dialect of the Black Country area remains perhaps one of the last examples of early English still spoken today.
So if you are growing tired of death eaters and Dumbledore, why not try Dudley for a hit of really dark magic, or even Sarehole for a night of sorcery.
LINKS
Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings is a mythical journey, a quest, in a parallel world to that the writer grew up in. Look at another mythical character, also linked to questing [Lancelot’s pursuit of the Holy Grail] in King Arthur – The Identity of a Myth in the Cumbria section and how his legends are associated with the North West, just as they are in regions across the country.