Mordor on the Oxford express

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On a railway journey home to Oxford from Manchester on 26 June 1935, Tolkien wrote about the landscape passing by through the train window: 

from Crewe to Wellington and Wrekin,

from Shropshire down into the black,

bleak, blasted country made of slack,

cinders, old iron, and poisoned water.

— ‘When Little Louis Came to Stay’ (Collected Poems, 1112)

It’s his only known description of England’s Black Country, which lies in southern Staffordshire and to the north-west of Birmingham, the city where Tolkien had spent his youth. It appears in The Collected Poems of J.R.R. Tolkien, which I reviewed last year for the Times Literary Supplement. It’s a verse addressed to his Manchester hosts, former Leeds University colleague E.V. Gordon and family.

In keeping with my Agatha Christiesque headline, I’ve sleuthed out what I think may be the train that Tolkien caught. The timetable appears in the closest edition of Bradshaw’s famous railway guide that I can find – early 1939 (before any wartime schedule changes). He’d have seen the Wrekin, a striking isolated height, on the right after Wellington. This train entered the Black Country at Wolverhampton and ran through it for half an hour before leaving it behind and entering Birmingham. For Tolkien, that was half an hour too much.

The poem at this point is self-reflexively about his inspiration to write it, personified in classical tradition as his ‘muse’. She starts ‘all stiff and hoarse’ until he reaches the Black Country.

And there a sudden frenzy caught her,
till by the time we came to Brum
she beat like a savage on a drum,
blaspheming the bright sun on high
proud and pitiless in clean sky
disdainful of the human blight
writhing in unaccustomed light.

‘Brum’ is Birmingham. His muse here is angry. You might say his muse is anger.

The lines describing the Black Country itself are a real nugget. It is often said that this very real Black Country was the inspiration for his fictional Mordor. Yet wherever anyone says this, you’ll probably find a Tolkien fan scoffing, spluttering or choking in disbelief. But I’ve argued that it’s a reasonable claim – and I think Tolkien’s 1935 poem adds a little to the picture.

Tolkien first named the land of Sauron Mordor, translating the name as ‘the Black Country’, in his ‘Fall of Númenor’ (The Lost Road and Other Writings 29), written no more than a year before he began The Lord of the Rings in December 1937. Mordor is also translated as ‘the Black Country’ in initial 1939 workings for the Council of Elrond and in rewritings probably from 1941 (Return of the Shadow 216 and Treason of Isengard 144). Ioreth of Minas Tirith calls it the same name in the published book, and her locution may be taken as the popular one in Gondor.

The real Black Country was an area of heavy industry even before the 18th century, when it became a heartland of the Industrial Revolution, full of coal mines and ironworks or other factories using coal-fired furnaces. Why is it called the Black Country? Opinion is divided. In places the terrain is literally black because of exposed coal seams. In the 19th century its air, earth and water were heavily polluted; the sky black by day, red by night. It seems logical to me that the literal, topographical reference in the name would have led to its more allusive and all-encompassing implications.

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In his poem, Tolkien calls the region a ‘blasted country made of slack, / cinders, old iron, and poisoned water’. Slack means the waste left over from coal extraction: from dust to small fragments, high in ash content and low in quality. Traditionally it went into kilns for burning limestone to make quicklime (S'ouvre dans une nouvelle fenêtre) or firing clay bricks. The next word in Tolkien’s poem, cinders, has the same range of senses, or much the same: either the dross from metal furnaces or the small fragmentary coal left over from burning. But in sound, sense and perhaps etymology, slack overlaps with another word. Slag refers to the stony waste material separated from metals by smelting. In another common sense, especially seen in the compound slag heap, it also means the same slack. In a third sense, though, slag is distinct: it means hardened lava in irregular, porous lumps – which looks similar to metallic dross.

Now, at the very doorstep of Mordor, in the wasteland before the Black Gates, Frodo and Sam see ‘high mounds of crushed and powdered rock, great cones of earth fire-blasted’ (LR 631). Knowing that Mount Doom stands distantly on the far side of the Gates, we may think of a volcanic wasteland. Tolkien also compared this ‘Battle Plain’ to the Somme battlefield. Either may explain the ‘blasted’ aspect of the land.

But the description when the Captains of the West advance on the Black Gates includes further, telling details: ‘North amid their noisome pits lay the first of the great heaps and hills of slag and broken rock and blasted earth, the vomit of the maggot-folk of Mordor’; and they draw their armies up on ‘two great hills of blasted stone and earth that orcs had piled in years of labour’ (887). These pits may be the home of the orcs, but equally they appear to have been mines – perhaps coal mines, to judge by the word slag, or iron mines.

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In Tolkien’s verse the Black Country is also made of ‘old iron’. It was the combination of coal and iron seams that made the region so ripe for industry; at its height there were 200 blast furnaces there. That was some eighty years before Tolkien was describing Mordor in The Lord of the Rings. We don’t get the impression that iron is widespread in Sauron’s realm. But it is there in ‘the two vast iron doors of the Black Gate’ itself (887) as well as in Mordor’s next set of gates (Carach Angren, the Iron Jaws), in the bridge of iron leading to the Dark Tower, and in the tower’s iron crown. All this outsized ironmongery implies a history of smelting on a massive scale.

The final constituent of Tolkien’s Black Country, ‘poisoned water’, may seem a little surprising. But the landscape there was crisscrossed by canals, looping and branching in a tangled web, constructed (before the railways) to serve industry and ship its products afar. They were, of course, heavily polluted. So, for reasons unexplained, is the first Mordor stream that Frodo and Sam encounter: the Morgulduin that flows beside Minas Morgul. When they later find a trickle of water in the desert of Gorgoroth, it is ‘bitter and oily’ (921).

For comparison, here are some descriptions of the Black Country by another West Midlands author writing in the mid-20th century:

A canal barge painted in garish colours, swimming in yellow water, foul with alkali refuse… A disused factory with a tall chimney… Another mile of black desert, pools and slag heaps…

That’s from 1919’s The Young Physician.

A sunless, treeless waste, within a crescent of mournful hills from whose summits a canopy of eternal smoke was suspended above a slagged desert… forges and pitheads and brickyards and furnaces… mounds on which mineral and metallic waste had been tipped… drowned clay-pits and sullen canals.

That’s from Far Forest, published in 1936 and therefore almost exactly contemporary with Tolkien’s verse.

Despite all these rather striking comparisons, I would certainly not say that Mordor is meant actually to be, or represent, England’s Black Country. How so?

Claims of a Mordor link are widespread and easily found online. Wolverhampton Art Gallery held a 2014 exhibition, The Making of Mordor (S'ouvre dans une nouvelle fenêtre), claiming local inspiration. This later article (S'ouvre dans une nouvelle fenêtre) about Tolkien’s Birmingham inspirations places it confidently alongside claims that ‘the structure of Isengard was based on the University of Birmingham, the Two Towers of Gondor were based on Edgbaston Waterworks tower and Perrott’s Folly, and the Shire was inspired by Sarehole, the village in which he grew up’. I see no worth in the Two Towers claim (see my The Worlds of J.R.R. Tolkien, page 155, and my paper in The Proceedings of the Tolkien 2019 Conference (S'ouvre dans une nouvelle fenêtre), published this month). I see little in the comparison between the Birmingham University tower and Orthance, though when I visited I was struck (S'ouvre dans une nouvelle fenêtre) by its position at the centre of a semicircle of buildings facing inwards, like Isengard’s enclosing circle. But Tolkien himself said the Shire was ‘more or less a Warwickshire village on the eve of the Diamond Jubilee’ (Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien, no. ). In 1897, when Queen Victoria had been on the throne for 60 years, Tolkien lived in Sarehole, a village in Warwickshire.

I understand why some people scoff at the idea that the real Black Country inspired Mordor. Surely Sauron’s realm, a kind of hell on earth, is much worse. Surely Tolkien, with his astonishing imagination, didn’t need a real place as inspiration. Or if he did, surely the battlefields of the Somme played a major part (as I have said myself). Surely, too, he objected to the one-to-one correspondences between fiction and reality which characterise allegory, a literary technique he affected to loathe.

Tolkien himself offers a different way of understanding how a simple phrase like ‘the Black Country’ can work on readers of literature. In his seminal essay On Fairy-stories, he argues that literary suggestion has a suggestive power that visual art lacks.

If a story says “he climbed a hill and saw a river in the valley below,” the illustrator may catch, or nearly catch, his own vision of such a scene; but every hearer of the words will have his own picture, and it will be made out of all the hills and rivers and dales he has ever seen, but especially out of The Hill, The River, The Valley which were for him the first embodiment of the word.

This has implications for what goes through the storyteller’s mind (or subconscious, if you like) in the process of creation. First visualising the Hill in Hobbiton, Tolkien may have first thought of a particular hill – one that for him first embodied what a hill was, the hillness of hills. Even if he thought consciously of particular other hills, or tried to conjure a hill directly out of his imagination, his sense of hillness would be shaped by the memory (conscious or subconscious) of that primal hill.

Likewise with the Black Country. For readers, Tolkien’s descriptions of Mordor are bound to evoke landscapes polluted by modern industry. And it will strike a chord with the primal ‘black country’ or industrial wasteland in each reader’s dim, distant memories. For Tolkien himself, as I put it in The Worlds of J.R.R. Tolkien, published in 2020, ‘his fictional Black Country will have been made out of every blasted, poisoned and fume-filled country he had ever seen, but especially out of the Black Country which, for him, first embodied the phrase’ (184). I hadn’t seen Tolkien’s verse description of the Black Country, of course, when I wrote that.

This summer, I’m leading a three-week course at Merton College, Oxford, for Berkeley alumni, and I hope to take them to the Black Country Living Museum. So you may read more from me about that here in due course…