Dreaming shires: how East Yorkshire shaped Tolkien’s Middle-earth fantasy

Invalided home from the Somme, the Lord of the Rings author was inspired by this peaceful landscape to begin the epic tales now getting the Amazon blockbuster treatment

Trench fever. I used to imagine it akin to flu, or Covid even, but this is in some ways a nastier disease. Caused by bacteria carried on lice, its symptoms include high temperature, headache and excruciating pains in the legs and back. And though symptoms fade after some days, the Bartonella quintana bacterium keeps rearing its debilitating head, causing relapses for months or years.

Nasty, then. But had it not infected a 24-year-old officer fighting on the Somme in 1916, the world might never have had The Lord of the Rings or The Hobbit, Peter Jackson would have had to find other stuff to occupy the early years of this century, and Amazon would not be preparing to launch the most expensive television series ever made – The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power.