Westminster Abbey is a place of mystical significance for England. Aside from being the national pantheon, where the worthies of this island’s story are entombed or remembered, as the place where our kings are crowned and anointed there is an even deeper psychogeography here. Not even the equally deadening hands of Anglican Protestantism and mass tourism have managed to quell the meaning this place has and which endures today across the centuries.
That which endures was the cornerstone of the work of the writer, scholar, artist and linguist JRR Tolkien, who Abbey authorities have announced will be remembered with a new monument in Poets’ Corner. After consultation with the Tolkien Estate as well as several experts in the writer’s work, sculptor Stephen Broadbent is crafting a wooden memorial inspired by the Tree of Amalion that Tolkien often drew but left no record of in his legendary world.
