A Journey to Kortirion

A Brief Introduction to Tolkien's Warwick

Exploring the magical and mystical sites of the British countryside is one of my very favourite pastimes. This land is positively teeming with stories, spanning thousands of years of history and pre-history, and one could easily spend a lifetime exploring its meandering story-lines and only begin to scratch the surface.

Naturally, my favourite sites will always be those that played a role in inspiring J.R.R. Tolkien’s imagination: whether they be sites that he lived or worked in, locations where important life events took place, or simply places he visited which moved him. Of course, many of these sites are significant for other historical or mythic reasons (this is often precisely why they interested him), but through the filter of his own mythopoeic creativity they take on additional layers of meaning.

Some of these sites served as inspirations (either looser or stricter) for the locations in Middle-earth, but there are some places that left an even more profound impression on the Legendarium, being directly inserted into it.

Middle-earth is, after all, not a fictional place or foreign planet — even if the stories he places within it are indeed invented. It is our own Earth. Or, more precisely, the Earth as it was experienced by the great myth-makers of old. It is the Earth of Homer, of Snorri Sturlusson, of the writers of the Mabinogion and the Mahābhārata. It is the Earth that we all once knew, before we decided that the ‘Earth’ was little more than a disenchanted rock hurling through space. It is the Earth that we may still manage to encounter when we find ourselves caught in a song—when we are enchanted.

This weekend, I had the great fortune to finally visit one of these special places—enchanted locations which found a home in the earliest layers of Tolkien’s Legendarium: this is the ancient town of Warwick, or, in Tolkien’s mythic geography, Kortirion.

Kortirion and Alalminórë

When most people think of Tolkien’s England, Oxford and Birmingham (specifically the hamlet of Sarehole) are usually the first locations to spring to mind. These are, after all, the places where he spent the majority of his life. But there are many other locations that, at least for a time, were far more important in the ‘secondary history’ of Middle-earth, and in the fictive transmission lineage of the mythology.

First some explanation: in the first versions of the ‘Silmarillion’ materials, the stories of the Elder Days were presented within a complex ‘framing story’ which explained how they came down to us in modern times. The chief actor in this process was a man called Eriol (‘One Who Dreams Alone’) by the Elves, but who possessed the Mannish name Ottor Wæfre (in the earliest layer) or Ælfwine (in later versions). The story of Eriol evolved substantially over time, but here we will focus on the earliest layer of the mythology, in which he was an Anglian mariner from the European mainland born sometime around the 5th century CE. After escaping captivity following the sacking of his homeland, he settled in Heligoland and had two sons, Hengest and Horsa (yes, those ones). But after the death of his wife, Cwén, he fell prey to his sea-longing and set sail over the Atlantic Ocean. At this time (according to the early mythology), Britain was not where it is now, but was instead none other than Tol Eressëa, the Lonely Island inhabited by the exiled Elves far off the coast of Valinor. When he arrives in Tol Eressëa (future Britain), partly with the assistance of the sea-god Ulmo (in disguise), he stumbles upon the city of Kortirion in the centre of the isle and meets a community of Elves who tell him the lost stories of their people—these are the ‘Lost Tales’. At the end of his time there, the great ‘Faring Forth’ occurs, during which the Lonely Isle is drawn across the ocean (with part of it—Ireland—breaking off in the process), and the land—our Britain—is invaded by human settlers.

Much of this framing narrative changed over time. Eriol later became an Anglo-Saxon mariner from the West Country by the name of Ælfwine, and Tol Eressëa’s conflation with Britain was wholly abandoned. Furthermore, Tolkien experimented with other ‘framing narratives’ to explain how the stories of the Elder Days came into modern hands—first flirting with dream revelations in the Númenóren materials, and later utilising the Red Book of Westmarch as the main means of transmission. But there is good reason to believe that he never intended to fully abandon the Eriol device, even though he struggled to ‘make it work’. It was ultimately Christopher’s decision to exclude it outright from the published Silmarillion, though one cannot blame him for not knowing what to do with such a difficult literary conceit.

Leaving this behind us for now, I will primarily focus on the significance of Warwick in the earliest layers of the Legendarium, when the city was indeed one and the same as Kortirion.

Tolkien spent a good deal of time in Warwick in his early adulthood, as it was here that Edith and her cousin Jennie lived in the years leading up to Tolkien and Edith’s wedding. They were married at St. Mary Immaculate Church on the 22nd of March, 1916, shortly before Tolkien left to fight in the First World War (I was very glad to see that the church bears a blue plaque commemorating this event).

Because of this personal connection, it is not surprising that Warwick took on such profound importance in Tolkien’s developing mythology. It was also, of course, a deeply important historical city, particularly with its long-standing Saxon connections (even into the period of the Norman conquest).

Warwick/Kortirion, as mentioned, was the location of the ‘Cottage of Lost Play’, and thus the home of Lindo (Lord of the Cottage) and his wife Vairë (who is not the same as the goddess Vairë, but the latter’s name was certainly taken from the former). It is also here that Meril-i-Turinqi (‘Queen of Flowers’) had her home among a great korin (a ‘circular’ grove) of Elm trees atop the hill. In this phase of the Legendarium, the River Avon is the ‘Gliding Water’, and the surrounding region of Warwickshire is Alalminórë, the ‘Land of Elms’ where Tinfang Warble was wont to roam.

The ‘Land of Elms’ was once a very fitting moniker for Warwickshire, which used to be home to the famous ‘Forest of Arden’, mentioned frequently in Shakespeare’s works, which has unfortunately almost entirely disappeared through successive generations of deforestation. Elms were indeed among the most populous trees in Arden, and remained a common sight in Warwickshire even in Tolkien’s time, until most were sadly killed by Dutch elm disease (DED) in the 1970s. There have been numerous efforts to reforest the region in recent decades, and broader initiatives to bring elms back to the British countryside, but whether or not these projects actually pan out remains to be seen.

The Town of Dreams

Warwick was at the centre of some of Tolkien’s earliest mythopoetic ‘germs’, including the poem ‘Kortirion among the Trees’, the first workings of which were penned in 1915 under the shadow of war. While this poem underwent many revisions over the years (at least five manuscripts and ten typescripts, with the latest possibly emerging as late as 1962), its melancholic themes remain constant throughout its numerous iterations. Kortirion is here depicted as a place of memory, grief, and nostalgia—a kind of ‘ground zero’ for the fading elves motif which runs straight through Tolkien’s mythological corpus. The “earliest extant complete version”, published by Hammond & Scull in The Collected Poems of J.R.R. Tolkien: 1910-1919, begins:

O fading town upon a little hill,
Old memory is waning in your ancient gates;
Your robe gone grey, your old heart almost still;
Your castle only frowning ever waits
And watches how among the elms
The Gliding-water leaves these inland realms
And slips between long meadows to the western sea —
Still bearing downward over murmurous falls
One year and then another to the sea;
And quietly thither have a many gone
Since first the fairies built Kortirion.¹

Slightly edited versions of the poem were sent to Edith, as well as Tolkien’s TCBS comrades. Upon receipt of his copy, GB Smith wrote to Tolkien in January 1916 that he carried his copy “about with me like a treasure. I must beyond measure congratulate you — it is a great and noble poem, worthy I am sure of the place of which it is reminiscent […] I don’t care a damn if the Bosch drops half-a-dozen h.e.s. [high-explosive shells] all round and on top of this dug-out I am writing in, so long as people go on making verses about ‘Kortirion among the Trees’ …”² Smith died in December of the same year.

The ever-looming war, while certainly a veiled presence in ‘Kortirion among the Trees’, is somewhat more explicit in another of Tolkien’s Warwick-related poems, known variably as ‘The Wanderer’s Allegiance’, ‘The Sorrowful City’, ‘The Town of Dreams and the City of Present Sorrow’, ‘Wínsele Wéste, Windge Reste Réte Berofene’, ‘The Town of Dead Days’, and ‘The Song of Eriol’. Envisaged in some iterations as a poetic triptych, this work is dedicated to both Warwick and Oxford in the midst of the First World War. The prelude was ultimately transformed into the Song of Eriol, through which Eriol tells the Elves of his own homeland, but in its original form(s) it was a strictly autobiographical piece from the ‘primary world’, rather than a component of Tolkien’s emerging mythology.

While the themes of sorrow and melancholy are still present, there is an increased sense of impending peril, with Warwick featuring as a kind of shielded refuge from the growing turmoil of the war. In the section dedicated to Warwick (‘The Town of Dreams’), he writes (ca. 16-18 March 1916):

Here many days had gently past me crept
In this dear town of old forgetfulness;
Here all entwined in dreams I long had slept
And heard no echo of the world’s distress
Come through the rustle of the elms’ rich leaves,
While Avon gurgling over shallows wove
Unending melody, and morns and eves
Slipped down her waters till the Autumn came,
…
The Elm robe, and disrobe her of a million leaves
Like moments clustered in a crowded year,
Still their old heart unmoved nor weeps, nor grieves
Uncomprehending of this evil tide,
Today’s great sadness or tomorrow’s fear:
Faint echoes fade within their drowsy halls
Like ghosts; the daylight creeps across their walls³

In addition to being faced with the stark realities of war, Tolkien’s nostalgic impressions of Warwick were also certainly influenced by his grief at the ongoing industrialisation of the Midlands. Compared to the congestion and stench of Birmingham, Warwick would have certainly seemed like a portal into the past—a remaining bastion of antiquity in a rapidly-changing world. It was a city asleep, unmoved by the cycles of time … for better or for worse.

By contrast, Tolkien’s treatment of Oxford, ‘The City of Present Sorrow’, is markedly different in the poem. Unlike Warwick, which seems to slumber in a dream-like state of (in John Garth’s words) “deceptive continuity”⁴, Oxford was not afforded the same protection from the grim realities of war. The ‘academic bubble’ of Oxford was positively burst by the First World War, with around 19% of the faculty and student body who served losing their lives in the conflict. Tolkien writes:

For thy heart knows, and thou shedst many tears
For all the sorrow of these evil years.
Thy thousand pinnacles and fretted spires
Are lit with echoes and the lambent fires
Of many companies of bells that ring
Rousing pale visions of majestic days
The windy years have strewn down distant ways;
And in thy halls still doth thy Spirit sing
Songs of old memory amid thy present tears,
Or hope of days to come half-sad with many fears;
Lo! though along thy paths no laughter runs
While war untimely takes thy many sons,
No tide of evil can thy glory drown
Robed in sad majesty, the stars thy crown⁵

“In contrast to Warwick’s inertia,” Garth writes, “Oxford shows true continuity, based on academic erudition and the perpetual renewal of its membership”.⁶ Nevertheless, as a ‘Wanderer’ between lands, Tolkien seems deeply torn between these two rivalling positions in a volatile world: that of dream-like remembrance (Warwick) and perilous responsiveness (Oxford). He was, in many ways, stuck between passively mourning what was lost, and actively contributing to the inevitable changes at hand. Mere months after completing the first version of the poem, Tolkien set off for war with the Lancashire Fusiliers, fully expecting that he would never return. Of the four core members of the TCBS, only two did return from war—Tolkien and Christopher Wiseman—with Tolkien nearly dying from a nasty bout of trench fever.

Wiseman was, for his part, critical of Tolkien’s apparent navel-gazing in The Sorrowful City, feeling that he should move on from mining the autobiographical ‘vein’ in his writing to pursue his far more important mythopoeic work.⁷ Particularly in the years following the war, this would become Tolkien’s primary method of navigating his apparent ‘split allegiances’ between passive reflection and active engagement. In part to carry the torch of the now-diminished TCBS, Tolkien’s mythopoeic project would become the primary means by which he would seek to make his mark on the world and, perhaps, to make it better. Garth quotes G.B. Smith as stating that the primary impetus underlying the TCBS was “to re-establish sanity, cleanliness, and the love of real and true beauty in everyone’s breast”.⁸ Particularly after the death of Smith and Robert Gilson, Tolkien clearly felt compelled to carry this mission forward through his literary work.

Becoming Warwick

Back to Warwick, it’s notable that Tolkien even supplied the name of the city with an invented etymology in his ‘Elvo-Indo-European’ framework.⁹ While it is conventionally believed that Warwick derives from OE wæring (‘dam/weir’) and -wīc (‘dwelling’), Tolkien takes wær to be a cognate (and in fact derivative) of Qenya kôr (derived from Early Primitive Elvish guorǎ), based on the root KORO (to ‘be round’). Thus Kortirion (and Gnomish *Gwarmindon) are devised as sharing an etymological link with English ‘Warwick’.

The name ‘Warwick’ itself, according to the early mythology, arose at the time of Eriol’s son Hengest (one and the same as the legendary Germanic leader), who is said to have settled here after the Anglo-Saxon invasion, while his brother Horsa settled in Oxford (Taruithorn), and their half-brother Heorrenda (who, unlike Hengest and Horsa, was half-Elven) settled in Great Haywood (Tavrobel).

While this is of course myth and not history, it is notable that Warwick has indeed been inhabited for a phenomenally long time, with a hilltop settlement dating back to the early Neolithic era. Tolkien was, of course, aware of its deep history, as well as its important location in the very heart of England. It seems quite fitting that he would select this city to be an ancient abode of the fading Elves, and its idyllic countryside as the favoured stomping grounds of such figures as Tinfang Warble.

It was, of course, not Ingil but William the Conqueror who first established the famous Warwick Castle in the 11th century, which was re-built in stone in the century that followed. In this later period it was equipped with great stone towers (Caesar’s Tower and Guy’s Tower), which are referenced numerous times in Tolkien’s early poems. These towers certainly inspired the Tower of Ingil (Tirin na Gilweth) on Tol Eressëa in the early Legendarium.

Further influences from Warwick Castle can be detected in the cities of the Third Age, including Minas Tirith, Amon Sûl, Amon Hen, and Edoras. It is not difficult to imagine that the nearby Lord Leycester Hospital, which has served as a hospital and residence for aged and injured soldiers since 1571, might have served as an inspiration for the Houses of Healing in Minas Tirith.

Standing beneath the looming stone towers of Warwick Castle, with the River Avon gliding past as it has for millennia, it’s easy to see why this place cast such a long shadow over Tolkien’s imagination. Warwick is not just a footnote in the story of his life—it is one of the mythic hearts of this Middle-earth, a place where fading Elves still walk in memory, and the past lingers like mist among the trees.

1. The Collected Poems of J.R.R. Tolkien: 1910-1919, ed. Christina Scull & Wayne G. Hammond (London: HarperCollins, 2024), pp. 254-58.

2. Ibid., p. 262.

3. Ibid., p. 322.

4. John Garth, Tolkien and the Great War (London: HarperCollins, 2004), p. 131.

5. The Collected Poems of J.R.R. Tolkien: 1910-1919, p. 323.

6. Garth 2004, p. 132.

7. The Collected Poems of J.R.R. Tolkien: 1910-1919, p. 324.

8. Garth 2004, p. 105.

9. While somewhat controversial, this term (coined, it seems, by Mark T. Hooker) highlights the notion that Tolkien intended for his Elvish languages to be distantly related to primary-world language families—namely Indo-European and Finno-Ugric.