Memorial to J.R.R. Tolkien to be unveiled in Westminster Abbey

Inspired by Tolkien’s sketches of the ‘Tree of Tales’ the 2.5-metre-high memorial will be placed in a pillar in the south transept, near the memorial of Tolkien’s friend, the writer C.S. Lewis.

The unveiling will occur next spring, to mark the 90th anniversary of the publication of The Hobbit in 1937 and the 50th anniversary of that of The Silmarillion.

Made chiefly from species of British timber, it will include extracts of the black pine or Pinus Negra known as ‘Tolkien’s tree’ because he cherished it while a professor of Old and Middle English and Old Norse at Oxford. In 2014, it was felled in the university’s Botanic Garden.

A caption accompanying illustrations of the Tree of Tales on the website of the Tolkien Estate says: “Many times over the years Tolkien drew a tree bearing different kinds of leaves and flowers. He called it the Tree of Amalion and it came to represent his literary work, his own personal ‘Tree of Tales’. Tolkien described this imaginary tree as bearing, ‘various shapes of leaves many flowers small and large signifying poems and major legends.’”

Stephen Broadbent of Broadbent studio in Chester designed the memorial depicting a tree in a forest, after talking to Tolkien scholars and consulting the Tolkien Estate which funded the memorial.

It will be fashioned by a team including designers, artisans and engineers from Silverlining Furniture in Wrexham.

Lord Alton of Liverpool, chairman of the Christian Heritage Centre at Stonyhurst originally mooted the memorial idea.

The Dean of Westminster, the Very Reverend Dr David Hoyle said he was “delighted”, saying the memorial would be “a thing of beauty”.

 “The Hobbit was read to me when I was a boy; when I was a little older, I read The Lord of the Rings… 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”, he said.

More than 150 million copies of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy have sold worldwide.

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