Mordor, he wrote: how the Black Country inspired Tolkien's badlands

A new show called The Making of Mordor claims the steelworks and blast furnaces of the West Midlands inspired The Lord of the Rings. So did Tolkien see orcs there too? Stuart Jeffries, a Dudley boy, reports

Stuart Jeffries - theguardian.com, Friday 19 September 2014 

Visions from the Black Country … Tolkien’s Mount Doom as seen in the film of Lord of the Rings.

“The country is very desolate everywhere. There are coals about and the grass is quite blasted and black.” So wrote Victoria, the 13-year-old princess, in her diary in August 1832 after travelling through the recently industrialised land of pits, steelworks, blast furnaces, forges and fire north-west of Birmingham – a place that was just beginning to be known as the Black Country. “The men, woemen (sic), children, country and houses are all black,” she added, “but I cannot by any description give an idea of its strange and extraordinary appearance.”

A century and a half later, Caitlin Moran’s dad had a go. As Moran recalls in her memoir How to Build a Girl, he was driving her through the Black Country to collect a poetry prize in Birmingham. “Halfway up Brierley Hill, he points to the quiet street-lit valley below. All empty industrial estates and small, coiled ribbons of housing. ‘When I was a kid, you’d come up this hill, and all of that’ – and he gestures to the valley in front of us – ‘was on fire. The foundries and the forges and the ironworks. The potteries. The whole place glowed – sheets of sparks, 50 foot high. The fires never went out. It looked like hell. That’s what your Lord of the Rings is about. Tolkien was from round here. He was writing about how the industrial 
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