‘Lord of the Rings’ inspired by the Burren, County Clare's, rugged landscape

March 25 is officially Tolkien Reading Day. Yes you heard us! In 2002 a New York journalist inquired with the Tolkien Society if there was such a thing and low and behold they set it up.

So why March 25? Well it's Tolkien’s birthday Jan 3 and Bilbo & Frodo’s birthday on Sept 22nd but March 25 is the perfect day as it's the date of the downfall of Sauron!

To honor the Tolkien Reading Day we thought it apt to look at the fact that his world of Middle Earth is based on the Burren, in County Clare.

This is the Burren as I remember it from a few hours driving through it this summer:

Mountains that drop in tiers like rough grey wedding cakes. White, flat-topped, rounded, calceous rocks, a foot high or so, separated by grassy crevices, usually about wide enough to trap an ankle. A bleak land, impossible to ride a horse on, or graze sheep on, and walking is done hopping from rock to rock. Small flowers in the crevices that like the limy soil. The occasional portal tomb - portal implies a grand door, but these are small tombs - you would have to crawl to go under the portal, crouch even if you were a hobbit.

There are some giant burial mounds (barrows) in Ireland, but not in the Burren. Overgrazing stripped the soil two thousand years ago, and the land could only support a few outcasts or hermits, catching birds and rabbits. "Not enough water to drown a man, nor a tree to hang him, nor earth enough to bury him."

Nothing in that landscape brings to my mind any of Tolkien's descriptions. Am I forgetting a passage?

So why March 25? Well it's Tolkien’s birthday Jan 3 and Bilbo & Frodo’s birthday on Sept 22nd but March 25 is the perfect day as it's the date of the downfall of Sauron!

On a lighter note...

Nonsense.

See Shippey’s book about the English language and Cambridge references.

and Tolkien’s bithday is in early January. March 25 is the feast of the Annunciation.

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