Author J.R.R. Tolkien and his wife Edith were paragons of virtue but she joked that local villagers were convinced that they were living together out of wedlock.The confusion arose because the couple were married during Lent – in March 1916, at the church of St Mary Immaculate in Warwick – and so were unable to have a full nuptial Mass. The situation was “rectified” a couple of months later, when the local parish priest, Fr Augustine Emery, gave them a special nuptial blessing in the church of St John the Baptist in Great Haywood in Staffordshire, where the couple was living at the time.“Edith used to joke that they’d been living in sin up to that point,” says David Robbie, who has been researching Tolkien’s Staffordshire links. Ne