Middle-earth is about to put down roots in one of Britain’s most storied rooms.
“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 Very Reverend Dr David Hoyle, Dean of Westminster, said it as the Abbey unveiled its plans.
Westminster Abbey announced Sept. 21 that author, artist, scholar and linguist J.R.R. Tolkien will receive a new memorial in Poets’ Corner in spring 2027. The tribute will stand alongside the memorial to his close friend, writer, scholar and poet C.S. Lewis.
The timing brings its own literary sparkle: 2027 marks 90 years since The Hobbit appeared and 50 since The Silmarillion was published. The memorial will rise 2.5 meters — just over eight feet — up a stone pillar in the Abbey’s south transept.
British public artist Stephen Broadbent shaped the design around Tolkien’s Tree of Tales, known as the Tree of Amalion. A tree at the center of a forest will invite visitors to look past the stonework and, for a moment, imagine another world.
“The artwork 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,” said Broadbent, describing the design.
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The piece will use mostly native British woods and include wood from the Oxford Botanic Garden’s beloved black pine, nicknamed Tolkien’s tree. Oxford University reported in 2014 that the Pinus nigra was a favorite of Tolkien and had to be felled after two limbs fell.
A team of designers, engineers and artisans from Silverlining Furniture in Wrexham will build the piece, mixing traditional craft with new techniques. Tolkien scholars and experts informed the final concept, the Estate was consulted, and its support made the memorial possible.
The setting carries weight too. Poets’ Corner is as a centuries-old destination for literature lovers, with more than 100 poets and writers buried or remembered there, including William Shakespeare, Jane Austen, the Brontë sisters and Charles Dickens, Westminster Abbey described.
Lewis joined that company much more recently. His memorial stone was unveiled Nov. 22, 2013, exactly 50 years after his death; Tolkien’s tribute will bring another Inkling into the same corner.
The reunion feels fitting.
According to Tolkien’s estate, Tolkien met Lewis at Oxford in 1926, began a lifelong friendship and became a key member with him of the Inklings, the informal literary club whose members regularly read their own work aloud. Tolkien also played a key role in Lewis’ conversion to Christianity. Their friendship helped nourish two of the last century’s most enduring imaginative worlds, now remembered within feet of each other.
For generations who first met Tolkien at bedtime, in a classroom or on a screen, Poets’ Corner will soon offer a handsome new reason to make the pilgrimage. The friendship behind it makes the tribute warmer — and the promise of costly courage and virtue keeps it unmistakably Tolkien.
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