Looking out through the bathroom window of the room I am staying in, at night most I see are lights from buildings who almost could be Victorian London, the horrible and beautiful city of the 1800´s, when the British Empire still ruled, Charles Dickens walked into the darkest pits of poor London and came out with a burning passion to write about it and make it known, and Queen Victoria was regent of an empire where the sun never set. And oh, what crimes that empire committed.
If you stand in the middle of that English soul, on Trafalgar Square, you´re at the middle of the empire. I noticed, just the other week, that one of the buildings is the former headquarters for the South Africa department, from back before the Boer wars that saw England invent the first concentration camps for the Afrikaan snipers and rebels and their families, and saw it lose one of the first dominoes that would make everything fall.
John Ronal Reuel Tolkien was born in Bloemfontein in South Africa in 1892. Soon, his very first book about the Shire and its peaceful little inhabitants, The Hobbit, or There and Back Again, written for his children in the house in Headington in Oxford, will come out as a movie in 2011.
