Tolkien Society Sarehole Festival review: worth the £8 entry?

The Tolkien Society's Sarehole Festival at Sarehole Mill in Birmingham ran for two days and cost 8 pounds to get in. My verdict on whether it was worth your time: it is, embarrassingly so. It's the opposite of the fan event where you queue for three hours to see a prop you could look up online, spend 40 pounds on a tote bag, and come home feeling like you've been to a theme park rather than anywhere near Tolkien.

I've been visiting the real places that inspired Middle-earth, the places Tolkien walked, lived in and drew from. I'm also a member of the Tolkien Society, which is how I found out this event existed at all. Sarehole Mill is the place that gave Tolkien the Shire, and once you know the connection, you probably won't unsee it.

Tolkien said he took the idea of hobbits from Sarehole's village people

In a 1966 interview, Tolkien talked about being brought up in poverty but being happy. He said: "I was running about in that country, and I took the idea of hobbits from the village people and the children." I think that's one of the most extraordinary things anyone has ever said about Birmingham.

The Shire is not invented. It's a memory, a specific, real, still standing memory, and you can walk around inside it for about the price of a round at Wetherspoons.

The Tolkien Society, which ran the festival, has Tolkien as its president

The festival was organized by the Tolkien Society, which is an educational charity, a literary society and an international fan club all in one. It was founded in 1969. When it was set up, the founders wrote to Tolkien and asked whether he would become president, and he agreed. He remains the society's president to this day, which I think is a cool fact. The society is based in the UK, but there are thousands of members in dozens of countries.

Members get two journals, Amon Hen and Mallorn. I'm a member, I receive them, and I vouch for them. Membership is roughly 30 pounds, and it's probably the best money I spend all year, which is not something I would have predicted saying ten years ago.

It's not as intimidating as it sounds. There are local events and regional meetups, and everyone there is there because they love Tolkien. That's the whole qualification. If you're into The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien's wider legendarium or anything in that orbit, it's absolutely worth it. You don't need to know every king of Númenor, speak Elvish or pronounce half the names correctly. You only need to enjoy the stories, and everything else tends to follow.

Why Sarehole became Tolkien's childhood playground

Tolkien's mother brought her two sons back to England from South Africa in 1895 to visit family. While they were here, Tolkien's father died, and the family ended up settling in Sarehole, which was then in Worcestershire. Today the area is Hall Green in Birmingham. It's also home to a pub that featured in Peaky Blinders, which has since closed down.

Sarehole quickly became one of the favorite places of Tolkien and his brother. The two of them would spend hours hopping fences, fishing in streams, hunting for insects and doing the things young lads did before the internet gave us all back pain and brain rot.

This occasionally annoyed the local miller, George Andrew, who would chase them away from the mill. Tolkien later nicknamed him the White Ogre, which feels like the kind of thing every grumpy man in a village secretly worries people are calling him behind his back.

Sarehole Mill's chimney and the tower on the Hobbiton mill

Sarehole Mill has something unusual about it: a chimney. Most watermills don't have one. This one does because a steam engine was installed in 1852, nearly a century after Matthew Boulton leased the mill for metal rolling.

When Tolkien later illustrated his own books, he consistently drew the mill at Hobbiton with a small tower rising from it. Compare the silhouette of Hobbiton's mill with Sarehole's distinctive chimney and it's hard not to see the connection. He spent years of his childhood looking at that chimney, and decades later he quietly slipped it into Middle-earth. Not as a grand tribute and not as a hidden Easter egg, but as part of the landscape he'd carried around in his head since he was a boy.

How a childhood of poverty and loss shaped the Shire and Mordor

That's the part of Tolkien's story I find genuinely moving, because he never pretended he'd had an easy life. His father died when he was young, and his mother died not long afterwards. The family struggled financially throughout much of his childhood. By most people's standards, he had very little of what we'd call a head start.

And to be brutally honest, we're talking about Birmingham. It's not exactly Rivendell. But Tolkien looked at places like Sarehole, the Lickey Hills and the Worcestershire countryside and saw something worth preserving, something beautiful, something worth remembering. I think that's what eventually became the Shire. Not some magical paradise, but a real place seen through the eyes of someone who loved it.

At the same time, from parts of Worcestershire you could look towards Birmingham and see the industrial skyline spreading across the horizon, with areas like Sparkbrook, factory chimneys pumping black smoke into the sky, and a growing city steadily swallowing the countryside around it. Many Tolkien scholars believe those views helped shape his ideas for Mordor and the industrial destruction of nature that appears throughout his work. That means one of the greatest fantasy worlds ever created may have been born from standing in a field near Birmingham thinking that one bit looks nice and another bit looks dreadful.

Why the Viking and Norse traders belonged at a Tolkien festival

There were many Viking and Norse traders at the festival, and I think plenty of people didn't fully clock why that fits. Whether it was deliberate or not, I don't know, but it works.

Tolkien was obsessed with Germanic languages and Norse mythology. In the 1920s he translated Beowulf, an Old English poem about a sixth century Geatish hero who sails to the aid of the Danes. At the University of Leeds he founded the Viking Club, where people met specifically to discuss extinct Germanic languages and culture. He also wrote his own version of the Norse legend of Sigurd and Gudrun, which includes the story of a cursed ring, which is obviously not entirely unrelated to a certain trilogy.

The cosmology of Middle-earth is built on the cosmology of the Norse universe. So I don't think the Viking traders were a quirky add-on. I think they were part of the same story.

What 8 pounds got you at the Sarehole Festival

Entry was 8 pounds, about what a pint costs in central London. For that, there was a history tent with rare books, including first editions of The Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit and The Silmarillion, along with original art dedicated to Tolkien, information about his life and Birmingham's history, and merchandise.

A rare book dealer whose newsletter is one of the few I look forward to gave a talk. He shared stories about extraordinary items Tolkien handled, recounted some wild stories about frauds and forgers in the rare books world, and offered advice on telling whether what you're looking at is genuine or worth nothing at all. I then watched him leave the history tent with a couple of bags full of books, and I want to know what he got.

Beyond the traders, there was jewelry, clothing, craftsmanship demonstrations, plenty of artwork, birds of prey and live music. All the food was themed to Middle-earth. I debated ordering something with a random name, something like Sauron's fiery ring.

My worry that Tolkien himself could get lost

I do have a genuine worry that Tolkien will get lost. With every new film, game and adaptation, there's a risk to me that Tolkien is the person who gets swallowed by the machine, and that the message, the vision and the humanity of it all get buried under the spectacle. We've all seen what happened with Star Wars.

It all started with one boy, born of poverty, loss and grief, who could find magic in the most unexpected places: a watermill in Birmingham, a smoky industrial skyline, and a miller chasing him off the property. To me, that story is worth protecting.

Why the Tolkien Society was right to keep the festival at Sarehole

Genuine credit to the Tolkien Society for keeping this festival exactly where it belongs. They didn't go to a grand venue. We're seeing Ren Faires, fantasy balls and similar events crop up everywhere, and they keep getting bigger, grander and more expensive, until you lose what it's all about: the story. The society didn't do any of that. They went to Sarehole.

I think it was the right call. Standing on that ground, knowing this is the specific patch of earth where he looked out and thought this is what home feels like, is a properly surreal feeling. It's magical in the actual sense of the word.

Ardacon's packed Middle-earth Strategy Battle Game tables

Tucked into the corner of the tent, and packed every time I walked past, was Ardacon. It's the biggest gathering of fans of the Middle-earth Strategy Battle Game in the world, home to the world championships and much more, and it's a completely free convention to attend.

Every time I passed their demo tables, they were full. There was a queue of families, kids, people of all ages and a dog called Negan, all waiting to learn how to play. And it wasn't in a tolerating you way but in a genuine we want to show you this way. If you've ever walked into a hobby space and felt like you weren't supposed to be there, you know that's not always a given. That feeling of someone actively wanting to show you something, rather than checking whether you've earned the right to be interested first, is rarer in hobby spaces than it should be, and it was everywhere at that table. I ended up talking to them for quite a long time.

The people were the best part of the Sarehole Festival

What I took away wasn't the books, the traders, the birds of prey or even Sauron's suspicious ring. It was the people.

Reading Tolkien lets you imagine the world he created. Standing in places like Sarehole helps you understand where that imagination came from. Behind one of the greatest fantasy worlds ever written was a real person shaped by real places, finding wonder in things most of us would walk straight past. A boy who grew up in poverty and loss looked at a watermill in Birmingham and quietly decided it was worth keeping forever. Not bad for Birmingham, really.