The author J.R.R. Tolkien, his wife and other children, regularly stayed at a guest house in the grounds belonging to Stonyhurst College. Their son, John, who was studying for the priesthood at the English College in Rome, was evacuated to the Jesuit seminary at St Mary’s Hall (now the preparatory school for Stonyhurst college) during the Second World War. Tolkien spent much of his time writing, both at the guest house and in the College itself.

Tolkien was renowned for his love of nature and the countryside around Stonyhurst is richly beautiful. A number of names which occur in ‘The Lord of the Rings’ are similar to those found around the village of Hurst Green, including Shire Lane (in Hurst Green) and the River Shirebourn (similar to the name of the family which built Stonyhurst). The ferry at Hacking Hall (still working when Tolkien was here) may have provided the inspiration for the Buckleberry Ferry in the book, and the view from Tom Bombadil’s house could well have been based on that from New Lodge.

Whatever the direct links which Tolkien used in his book, he certainly spent much of his time at Stonyhurst working on ‘The Lord of the Rings’ in a classroom on the upper gallery of the College. An Oxford Professor of Anglo Saxon and later of English Langauge and Literature, he also taught a few lessons at the College during his visits.

Stonyhust College is proud of its association with the author, which continued when his younger son Michael taught classics at the College and St Mary’s Hall in the late 1960s and early 1970s. With the opening of a new Tolkien Library at St Mary’s Hall in 2002, J.R.R. Tolkien’s connections with Lancashire’s Ribble Valley will live on for future generations.

Compiled over the course of some sixteen years, Tokien's epic fantasy ‘The Lord of the Rings’ was finally published in 1954/1955.
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