TAND by a stream and you might just hear the gentle chatter in its rippling rhythm. Look up at a tree canopy on an autumn day and see a cathedral of colour. Stand on a hilltop and look out over fields and rivers, villages and market towns. J. R. R. Tolkien’s imagination was populated by these encounters with the British landscape and he richly threaded both knowledge and memory through his work as a fantasy writer. This year, his novel celebrates the 70th anniversary of its original publication, in 1954. The story is of an unassuming, home-loving character named Frodo Baggins, who agrees to undertake a perilous quest that sees him depart a pastoral landscape and venture into increasingly doom-laden terrain that is mountainous and brutal. In , Nature’s beauty and harmony
