Tolkien grew up to become one of the best-known authors in the world. His most famous work, The Lord of the Rings (published 1954-55), was voted the most popular book of the 20th century and is one of the best-selling books ever written. The Hobbit (1937), another classic, has sold more than 100 million copies. Both have been translated into dozens of languages and made into successful films.

In The Journal of the Tolkien Society, Maggie Burns writes that in addition to the similarities between people, buildings and landscapes in his early life and in his writing there are also underlying themes, an outlook on life “characteristic of Birmingham that is reflected in Tolkien’s writing. He learned things from his early experiences in Birmingham that would be important to him throughout his life”.

Tolkien created a legendarium, a fictional mythology about the remote past of Earth, focusing on the Middle-earth. His legendarium includes The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings along with The Silmarillion and The History of Middle-earth series (both posthumously published by his son). Many authors had published works of fantasy before Tolkien, but his tremendous success led to a profound interest in the genre. He is now identified as the “father of modern fantasy literature”.

However, not many know that the foundation of his fantasy world was laid in industrial Birmingham. Middle-earth may be a fictional place, but it is rooted in reality. Tolkien’s foreword to Lord of the Rings says it all: “An author cannot of course remain wholly unaffected by his experience.”

The boy, who lived within 300 yards of the Sarehole Mill between the ages of four and eight, found it a great place to play. He and his brother often loped over the fence and spent hours in the grounds – playing, fishing, looking for bugs, and annoying the miller’s son, who they nicknamed the White Ogre as he would often chase them off.

In The Hobbit, JRR wrote of Bilbo Baggins “running as fast as his furry feet could carry him down the lane, past the great Mill, across The Water and then on for a mile or more”. He also added a surly miller to a couple of his stories, clearly drawing from experience.

The 250-year-old Sarehole Mill, now Grade II-listed, is believed to be the inspiration behind ‘the great mill’ in The Hobbit. “It was a kind of lost paradise. There was an old mill that really did grind corn with two millers, a great big pond with swans on it, a sandpit, a wonderful dell with flowers, a few old-fashioned village houses and, further away, a stream with another mill,” Tolkien said years later.

The mill has a chimney, unusual for a water mill. Not surprisingly, Tolkien always drew the mill in Hobbiton with a little tower when he illustrated his original books. Now restored to its former glory, the mill’s museum features the Signposts to Middle Earth exhibition that details the story of Tolkien’s connections with Sarehole and Birmingham. The serene mill pond is a haven for wildlife, including mallards, moorhens, and herons.

Mabel Tolkien, the author’s mother, found that life for a widow with two sons was tough at the turn of the 20th century. Consequently, the family had a somewhat nomadic existence, moving from Sarehole to Moseley and from Moseley to King’s Heath. The Tolkiens lived in nine homes in Birmingham between 1895 and 1911!

In an interview to The Guardian in 1966, Tolkien said he “was brought up in considerable poverty but I was happy running about in that country. I took the idea of the hobbits from the village people and children. They rather despised me because my mother liked me to be pretty. I went about with long hair and a Little Lord Fauntleroy costume”.

Carol Thompson, who curated a Making of Mordor exhibition at Wolverhampton Art Gallery, in an interview to The Guardian said Tolkien’s childhood was spent in a place that was very rural “which he adored. During his later life, he said that time was his happiest. But he saw the industrial landscape encroaching on his way of life as a child. He was very open about his loathing of industrialisation.”

Young Tolkien’s love of language came from his mother, who began to teach him German at Sarehole and also taught him Latin, sparking his interest in linguistics. The author later admitted that his mother’s teaching and his aunt’s patience (who taught him geometry) got him a scholarship to the city’s premier school. He began attending King Edward’s School in Birmingham when he turned eight, taking the tram from Moseley.

“I was as happy or the reverse at school as anywhere else, the faults being my own. I ended up anyway as a perfectly respectable and tolerably successful senior,” he said once.

Interestingly, Mabel Tolkien’s influence can be seen in The Lord of the Rings: her handwriting is remarkably similar to that of the Elvish script!

At King Edward’s School, Tolkien became good friends with a few other students and they formed the Tea Club and Barrovian Society (TCBS), a semi-secret society that indicated the boys’ fondness for drinking tea in Barrow’s Stores near their school and in the school library. All members had a keen interest in languages, and in myth and legend. All of them wrote, recited, rewrote, and exchanged ideas at every meeting. The club played an important in Tolkien’s growth as a writer.

Tolkien’s mother passed away when he was 12, and he and his brother became wards of a Catholic priest, Father Francis Xavier Morgan of the Birmingham Oratory. The Oratory’s rich cultural and spiritual environment is said to have inspired the religious themes and moral complexity in his later works.

The boy left Birmingham only when he won a place at university, moving to Exeter College, Oxford. He studied classics and then switched to English language and literature, for his first-class degree. From 1925 to 1945, he served as the Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon and a Fellow of Pembroke College, Oxford. Later, he was the Merton Professor of English Language and Literature and Fellow of Merton College, Oxford; he held these positions from 1945 until he retired in 1959.

Tolkien was a close friend of CS Lewis, and along with him was a member of the informal literary discussion group The Inklings, while at Oxford. The group was active for nearly two decades between the early 1930s and late 1949, and The Lord of the Rings was among the novels read out to members.

The author believed that his work “is all of a piece, and fundamentally linguistic in inspiration. The stories were made rather to provide a world for the languages than the reverse.”

The languages – and the places he created – drew inspiration from what he had seen firsthand. The back gardens of Sarehole Mill open to the deep and densely grown Moseley Bog, which was the inspiration behind the mysterious Old Forest, haunt of the ageless Tom Bombadil.

Tolkien’s warning seems to ring true in this woodland. “The trees do not like strangers. They watch you. They are usually content merely to watch you, as long as daylight lasts, and don’t do much. Occasionally the most unfriendly ones may drop a branch, or stick a root out, or grasp at you with a long trailer. But at night things can be most alarming, or so I am told,” he wrote in The Fellowship of the Ring.

The bog may be near Birmingham, but it seems more like Middle-earth – mysterious and mystifying.

Not too far is Perrott’s Folly, also known as The Monument or The Observatory, a 29-metre-tall light-house-like tower that dates to 1758. The Grade II-listed building, in Edgbaston area of Birmingham, stands close to the Edgbaston Waterworks Tower, a Victorian tower that was part of a complex of buildings designed by Joseph Chamberlain and William Martin in 1870. Together, they are said to have inspired Minas Morgul and Minas Tirith, the Two Towers of Gondor.

The University of Birmingham was the model of the fortress of Isengard, lair of the evil wizard Saruman and his orcs. The varsity served as a hospital for injured soldiers during World War I, and Tolkien spent six weeks here recuperating from trench fever when he first returned from the war. He couldn’t have failed to notice the imposing Chamberlain Tower, with its brightly illuminated and somewhat menacing giant clock face, as he recuperated. It made its way into his books as the terrifying Eye of Sauron.

Locals believe his Mordor, home to the evil Lord Sauron, finds inspiration in the Black Country, a region of Birmingham that was heavily polluted due to the many working iron foundries, coal mines and steel mills during the Industrial Revolution. A century ago, this region would have been camouflaged by sinister Mordor-like plumes of smoke.

Robert Blackham, a member of the Tolkien Society, offers Tolkien tours in Birmingham and discusses the city’s influence on the author’s work in The Roots of Tolkien’s Middle Earth. He writes that Lord of the Rings juxtaposes a pre-industrialised Shire with a post-industrialised Mordor, contrasting the former’s natural beauty with the wasteland covered in fire, ash, and war machines.

Isengard, once as beautiful, becomes a second Mordor after Saruman orders industrialisation. Treebeard, an ent and living tree, tells hobbits Merry and Pippin about the wizard’s orc: “They come with fire… they come with axes. Gnawing, biting, breaking, hacking, burning! Destroyers and usurpers, curse them!”

The Tolkien trail ends at the Plough and Harrow Pub, the perfect place for a pint (or a glass of red) and some well-earned rest. Tolkien returned to Birmingham in 1916 while on leave from the army, and stayed here with his new bride Edith before he travelled to France to join the British Expeditionary Force in the Great War as an officer in the Lancashire Fusiliers.

The author’s 16-plus years in Birmingham were special as they were the happiest time of his childhood. “I lived in childhood in a cottage on the edge of a really rural country — on the borders of a land and time more like… the lands and hills of the most primitive and wildest stories… than the present life of Western Towns (in fact and wish). This virtue of fairy story may appeal only to a kind of nostalgia, to mere regret. Yet nostalgia means an ‘(aching) desire to go home’,” he wrote in On Fairy Stories, a 1947 essay that discusses the fairy story as a literary form.

In The Letters of JRR Tolkien, Christopher, his son, reveals that Tolkien called Birmingham his home town along with Oxford. The training and company at Oxford may have polished his skills, but it was his early experiences in Birmingham that set him on course to create Middle-earth. After all, “still round the corner there may wait, a new road or a secret gate”.

Teja Lele is an independent editor and writes on books, travel and lifestyle.