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.
Westminster is a fitting place for this great bard to be remembered. This is the geographic point at which sanctity, monarchy, Parliament, marriage, death and national memory overlap and are enshrined. It all started as a Benedictine house on Thorney Island, later becoming a place of great pilgrimage when the relics of St Edward the Confessor – a great patron of the Abbey – were venerated. Even the hordes of tourists who dawdle through its nave, ambulatory and chapels are participating in an unknowing pilgrimage of sorts. (And their financial support certainly helps provide for its upkeep.) Here is a place for heroes, kings and poets – it would be hard to find a better candidate for inclusion than Prof Tolkien.
The writer has earned his place because both he and the Abbey belong to the world of the palimpsest. The word comes from the Greek palimpsēstos: something “scraped again”, like an old parchment from which a scribe rubs the old text to reuse it. A bit of the old text still remains.
Tolkien read beneath the modern surface of England to recover an older text: the greenness of the land, the freedom of the forest, the moral seriousness of legend and the sense that the world we can taste and see stands at the threshold of another one we cannot.
St Peter’s Church at Westminster is itself such a palimpsest. What began as a Benedictine monastery became the shrine of a Saxon king, then the coronation church of his Norman successors, a centre of Catholic piety, an institution of the Protestant Reformation and, today, the repository of national memory. Each successive England wrote itself upon the Abbey without entirely erasing what came before.
Middle-earth and its tales are not merely the whimsical creations of the imagination, but the fruit of Tolkien’s profound knowledge of northern languages and lore. He hoped to provide England with a mythology by recovering some sense of what England had lost. For Tolkien, fantasy was not an escapist aversion from reality, but a means of traversing the confines of the modern world in order to see reality all the more clearly.
There is a fitting connection here between Tolkien and St Edward. The Saxon king’s death in January 1066 stands at the threshold of the Norman Conquest, which Tolkien regarded as a catastrophe for England’s rich Anglo-Saxon civilisation. Yet the saint-king remains enshrined today at the heart of the monumental church that was raised by the descendants of those who conquered his kingdom. Loss, displacement, conquest and renewal are all present here, in a church dedicated to the Apostle and first pope – a dedication whose significance Tolkien the Catholic would have richly understood. Deep England remains bound to the Rome of the pontiffs and the Jerusalem of the apostles.
It will be within one of the great stone pillars of the Abbey that the monument will be inlaid. Fashioned chiefly from native woods gathered across Great Britain, it will contain a relic of “Tolkien’s Tree”, the beloved black pine of his Oxford years, which the Botanic Garden was forced to fell in 2014.
The plan is for the monument to be unveiled in spring 2027, coinciding with the 90th anniversary of The Hobbit and the 50th of The Silmarillion.
“The Hobbit was read to me when I was a boy,” Dr David Hoyle, the Dean of Westminster, said. “When I was a little older, I read The Lord of the Rings, and then I read it again.”
“We will remember here a master storyteller, a scholar, a man with a Christian imagination and a writer who helped some of us understand that a commitment to life and virtue might be costly and courageous.”
The sculptor Stephen Broadbent described it as a “delight and honour” to be selected for this project. “The artwork,” he said, “will present to the viewer the sense of peering into another world: a ‘Forest of Stories’, with Tolkien’s remarkable ‘Tree of Tales’ accepted into the heart of it. Then through this magical forest there is an evocative glimpse to a land beyond.”
Lord Alton, who first proposed the memorial, and the Abbey, Tolkien Estate, artists and craftsmen who are bringing it into being deserve our gratitude. Rooted in native wood, set within ancient stone and offering a glimpse into the lands beyond, this will be a fitting monument to the maker of Middle-earth.
(Photo: Jonny Nolan)
