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Saturday, 21 August 2021

In the Footsteps of Tolkien: 1947 - Tolkien and the Malvern Hills


1947 - Tolkien and the Malvern Hills

Update: The Malverns website has their J.R.R. Tolkien walking story now available as a PDF, you can find it by following this link: "The Chronicles of Malvernia’ Walking Stories: J.R.R. Tolkien". 

I wanted to share some things I've been discovering as I gather documents together for my continuing research into Tolkien, landscape and nature.

It all started whilst trying to discover more about walking trips I knew J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis had embarked on - I had two aims with this:

  1. To explore potential influences of the real landscape on Tolkien for a research project

  2. To explore potential places to actually go walking, linked with Tolkien in some way, but also just to explore more of Britain myself.

I quickly discovered Tolkien and Lewis did two walking trips in England (along with shorter walks with his family around Oxfordshire) - one in 1937 to the Quantocks (West Country) and one in 1947 in the Malvern Hills. There are brief mentions of these in biographies but nothing detailed. The Malvern Hills will be more accessible to me, so I leaned towards looking into that trip. I read that George Sayer had written something about that particular trip and everything fell into place. I found two wonderful articles in the journals of two societies I am part of – the Tolkien Society and the Mythopoeic Society - and now I have insights into the Malvern trip including the enlightening differences between Tolkien and Lewis’s walking styles:

Lewis to Sayer on Tolkien:

“He’s a great man, but not our sort of walker. He doesn’t seem able to talk and walk at the same time. He dawdles and then stops completely when he has something interesting to say. Warnie finds this particularly irritating.”

Tolkien on the Lewis brothers:

“ruthless walkers, very ruthless indeed”

As a walker myself, I find these both hilarious insights into the habits of walkers and also endears me more to Tolkien.

Those quotes come from the Mythlore source, George Sayer’s own article:

Sayer, G. “Recollections of J.R.R. Tolkien”. Mythlore, vol. 21, no. 2, 1996, pp. 21-25, https://dc.swosu.edu/mythlore/vol21/iss2/6/

The Tolkien Society source, from Mallorn, was Alex Lewis’s (chairman of the Tolkien Society 1988-1992) article about following Tolkien’s footsteps in the Malvern Hills with Tolkien artist Ted Nasmith following the Oxonmoot 1997. There are some great insights in that article too:

Lewis, A. “A Fiftieth Anniversary Walk (or There and Back Again, an Academics Day Out)”. Mallorn: The Journal of the Tolkien Society, no. 36, Nov. 1998, pp. 28-30, https://journals.tolkiensociety.org/mallorn/article/view/155

Alex Sayers writes about the route they may have taken:

“The reason we know for sure that we walked where the “Inklings Ramblers Society” had gone before us, was that George Sayers, who invited them up, lived in Great Malvern, as Priscilla had explained to us. In 1947, neither Tolkien nor C.S. Lewis had a car, and so, since Great Malvern is on the train line from Worcester, they would have taken a train from Oxford to Worcester, and then to Great Malvern. They stayed with George Sayers during the trip, and went out for walks - so they would most likely not have driven off into the countryside first and walked from some remote spot, but experienced the famous walks around Great Malvern itself. It would be the most obvious thing to do, especially in post-war Britain with austerity, rationing and so on – petrol was a rare and expensive commodity, and so they would have gone on foot.

The actual walk across the ridge and the five hills including the Beacon Hill at the far end may be just over three miles, but from Great Malvern one would have to walk up to where it starts - we drove to the starting point, and that drive alone is three miles each way, making a walk that would maybe extend from 12 to 15 miles (24 km) – a respectable distance for a day’s walking. It may even have been done in two separate walks, one to each drinking hole, using the ridge as a main walk.”

This helps greatly with future planning of a trip to the Malvern Hills. For now I’ll leave with some links for future reference in planning such a trip, hopefully I’ll get chance to go walking there in 2022 or 2023.

Some online resources:

Maps

Getting there

Official websites for the Malvern Hills

Mobile app

Guidebook to Great Malvern

Archaeology of the Malvern Hills

Historic England: British Camp

National Trust Midsummer Hill

“The Malvern Hills: An ancient landscape” by M. Bowden

Walks in the AONB

Gas lamps in Malvern (connected to C.S. Lewis)

Pubs (the two Inns mentioned in Alex Sayer’s article)


William Langland, Piers Plowman. England, late 14th century. Corpus Christi College, Oxford. 

I will return again to the subject of Tolkien and the Malvern Hills, once I have had more time to read and research.

Perhaps a note to end on, with thanks to Michael Flowers of the Tolkien Society, is that the medieval poem “Piers Ploughman” by William Langland begins with the poet waking up on the Malvern Hills, something I like to think Tolkien would have appreciated:

"And on a May morning, on Malvern hills,
Strange fancies befell me, and fairy-like dreams.
I was weary of wand'ring, and went to repose
On a broad green bank, by a burn-side;
As I lay there and leaned and looked on the waters,
I slumbered and slept, they sounded so merry."

Poem source: http://sacsanua.blogspot.com/2010/02/piers-plowman-translation-of-prologue.html
Image source: https://www.folger.edu/file/piers-plowman-corpus-christijpg

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2 comments:

  1. Melané Fahner-Botha8 April 2022 at 08:22

    What a great idea! Just knowing one is "walking in the footsteps of" real people. and then ending with that poem. Thank you for sharing this.

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    Replies
    1. Tim Bolton (Ranatuor)16 April 2023 at 17:25

      Thank you! And huge apologies for such a late reply, though I guess a wanderer is never late, they arrive precisely when they mean to! :)

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