And it isn’t. A lot has changed over the last decade or so.

And building a tree out of steel? Why not just plant an actual tree?!

The Easter Cross on the green looks decidedly underwhelming in relation to the Ent proposals. Does that mean a victory of pagans over christians? Or does it mean that there’ll have to be a bigger – a much bigger – cross?

I’m off to tug my forelocks, guv’nor.

J…

I’ve still to find mine though… slowly narrowing it down… currently have a few hundreds such issues (hey, everyone ELSE is an idiot… right?)

But I really like the idea of the floozie, the iron man and the ent all in the same place as. . . . Queen Victoria!

Since there’s already an Iron Man down there, perhaps the Steel Tree could go somewhere nearby.

Quakers. Who, besides the Lloyd family and the Cadburys? I haven’t heard any other famous names identified as Quakers.

BTW, etat, there is a fine statue (I think it’s still in front of the old registry office on Broad Street) of Boulton, Watt and Murdoch – admittedly the more industrialist-minded of the Lunar Men.

But yeah, it would be so much better to have a statue of some locally-Enlightened-person or people. Or a big hammer. Or a horse. Or maybe just plant some *real* trees. Fifty of them right there on the village ‘green’. Giant leylandii, perhaps. Tolkien would have liked that.

There seems to be a concensus among his biographers and his son that the twin towers as well as Sarehole Mill did inspire Tolkein as he wrote the Hobbit, etc., but in reality these are merely props to paint the universal picture of good versus evil.

As to the Shire, it is far more likely that his mother’s family, the Staffords, who hailed from the Evesham area, influenced his interpretation of Hobbitland. In fact Bag End really does exist some distance west of Alcester. And when in Oxford he enjoyed walking in North Oxfordshire. There is a place on the road between Chipping Norton and Moreton-in-Marsh where a pillar of limestone is called the “Four Counties Stone” representing where Oxfordshire, Warwickshire, Worcestershire and Gloucestershire all meet (or met at one time). This has an uncanny resemblence to the center of the Shire (which consisted of four “farthings”). So I suggest the Shire is located further south than Hall Green, etc.

The whole question of trees is interesting. Tolkein apparently did love trees and loved “Leafy Warwickshire”. He saw the hammer of Birmingham’s industry coming down on his beloved Forest of Arden (though in actual fact most of Arden’s oaks were long since gone to build the British Navy). When you drive up the Stratford Road through Shirley, Hall Green and SparkHill/SparkBrook it is hard to imagine that this was once a royal forest. A hundred years ago Hall Green was green but the suburbs were fast encroaching.

Tolkein never did anything for Birmingham other than lend his name to the preservation projects noted above. But his name is good for tourism so it has been over-used to the point of nausea. The steel Ent is an interesting parody of Tolkein’s acute awareness that industry was destroying the countryside. But how much better the living tree/monster at the Custard Factory to represent the concept.