How to Search For Inspiration (In Tolkien’s Hometown)

I arrived in Birmingham on the day so windy, that you had to hold on to the walls not to fly away. Enormous trees were falling on railroads and intercity trains got stuck in three-hour traffic jams. An almost fictional weather gave some bizarre hope that if home city of J.R.R.Tolkien welcomed you in style, rumors about Birmingham being nothing but a “big and bleak industrial giant with a messy infrastructure” could be a subject of personal taste. And who else but a girl raised on bleak Russian literature could know that writers’ inspiration comes from a different place than obvious sights attracting tourists.

When a city claims to be full of places that inspired the most escapist and imaginative of 20th century writers, it just cannot be boring, right? And it wasn’t.

Although no matter how sure I was that the general opinion is often and generally wrong, I still felt a notch discouraged by the walk from the station through unending tunnels of construction sights. The only tower seen from every corner of your eye was a new metal spike of a mobile operator.

I began to understand why Peter Jackson preferred to fly half of UK’s actors across the globe to New Zealand for Lord of the Rings’s setup.

Around the corner from Birmingham Central we came across the first sight mentioned in all “Tolkien trail” maps. Library with archives — brand new glass cube straight from Matrix rather than Middle Earth. With every step Birmingham looked more and more like a mixture of ruins from Dickensian world blended with unending construction site in the style of Berlin.

I immediately liked the fact that Tolkien’s notoriety didn’t turn the whole city into a “Lord of The Rings Super-Themed Park”. Writer’s larger than life imagination collided with the city’s busy life on its own. And I wonder perhaps that it does well for a lot of fantasy writers to grow up in huge cities with all sorts of scenery, scraps and bits of multiple pasts and futures.

You just need to know how to magnify imagination. And that Tolkien could for sure, both with the swamp next to his first childhood house, and with botanical garden slash giants’ forest (Ents). Birmingham’s central canals with their almost claustrophobic concentration had every right to serve a set up for the city of forest elves.

But the most intriguing in this windy spring walk were, surely, two towers. Built on the same street in mid-Birmingham, one as a waterworks, another — for apparently obscure reasons, were a sight of Tolkien’s daily walks when he was a student and moved to live with his relatives. Scholars in their usual style still argue which one meant which tower from the book, as Tolkien apparently loved to have a new tower for every hundred pages of his trilogy.

Towers hide in a comfortable 15-minute walk distance from the center. One step to the horizon and you’ll see typical sleeping suburb. Another couple of steps — and you’re back on central shopping street. “Waterworks road” is an unlikely place to make pictures. But I’m sure many do. More than anything it looks like a Ukrainian industrial suburb the likes I grew up around.

One tower, the gloomy and beautifully baroque turned out to be a part of a working medical center. Nurses suffered our interest with a quiet confidence of people who saw all kinds of mental disorders. The other tower in oriental style stood… in the middle of a closed parking lot. We were lucky enough to take a picture before another car drove through, opening the gates for just half a minute.

My colleague would be profoundly disappointed if she had even slightly cared about Tolkien in the first place.

What consoled us though was Catholic Oratory, Tolkien’s childhood church we came across on the way back to the center. Surrounded by such a distinctly protestant working city, Oratory could barely fit between other buildings on the streets. And on a busy Thursday morning when city streets were virtually empty, the church turned out to be filled with people.

We sat on the narrow bench to to take in the atmosphere of candle-lit quietness. I remembered my university years when we learned dzen of hour-long rides in Kharkov’s metro. Time-machines of dark crowded trains tearing you out of a standard soviet-era suburb overlooking the last mile of the city. And into historical center with its dream-like constructivist skyscrapers and 19th century decorations and Ukrainian Baroque, which my friends who lived in the center were never able to appreciate. The same — not many people can appreciate Birmingham as it is at face value.

In Birmingham I saw a city where you can learn the art of contrast. You don’t need to go to New Zealand to write Lord of the Rings. And maybe it’s even better not to. Find that empty wall so much adored by graffiti artists. Find the wall that haunts only your imagination, make invisible visible. And that’s why I love underground transport, and street art, post-industrial disorder, and now also Birmingham.