Welcome, dear readers, as ever.

In a letter to a “Mr. Wrigley”, Tolkien made this remark:

“I fear you may be right that the search for the sources of The Lord of the Rings is going to occupy academics for a generation or two.  I wish this need not be so.  To my mind it is the particular use in a particular situation of any motive, whether invented, deliberately borrowed, or unconsciously remembered that is the most interesting thing to consider.”  (letter to Mr. Wrigley, 25 May, 1972, Letters, 587)

I would like to add:  not just unconsciously remembered, but also consciously, as in the Caves of Aglarond.

“Strange are the ways of Men, Legolas!” Gimli suddenly burst out, continuing:  “Here they have one of the marvels of the Northern World, and what do they say of it?  Caves, they say!  Caves!  Holes to fly to in time of war, to store fodder in!  My good Legolas, do you know that the caverns of Helm’s Deep are vast and beautiful?  There would be an endless pilgrimage of Dwarves, merely to gaze at them, if such things were known to be.  Aye indeed, they would pay pure gold for a brief glance!”  (The Two Towers, Book Three, Chapter 8, “The Road to Isengard”)

Gimli and Legolas have just survived Saruman’s failed attack on Helm’s Deep,

(the Hildebrandts)

where Gimli, separated from his companions, has taken refuge in the very caves he is now raving about.

(Ted Nasmith—and, as ever, he has chosen a moment no one else has thought to illustrate—one of the many reasons I so admire his work)

As Gimli goes on—and he does for half a page—we hear of

“immeasurable halls, filled with an everlasting music of water that tinkles into pools, as fair as Kheled-zaram in the starlight…gems and crystals and veins of precious ore glint in the polished walls; and the light glows through folded marbles, shell-like, translucent as the living hands of Queen Galadriel.”

Remembering Gimli’s ultimate request from Galadriel—a strand of her hair:

“…which surpasses the gold of the earth as the stars surpass the gems of the mine.” (The Fellowship of the Ring, Book Two, Chapter 8, “Farewell to Lorien”)

this is an impressive comparison.  But, for all of JRRT’s wonderful imagination, in fact these caves, although perhaps embroidered by that imagination, were based upon a real place, as Tolkien tells us in a letter:

“I was most pleased by your reference to the description of ‘glittering caves’.  No other critic, I think, has picked it out for special mention.  It may interest you to know that the passage was based on the caves in Cheddar Gorge and was written just after I had revisited these in 1940 but was still coloured by my memory of them much earlier before they became so commercialized.  I had been there during my honeymoon nearly thirty years earlier.”  (letter to P. Rorke, SJ, 4 February, 1971, Letters, 572)

Cheddar Gorge is a natural feature in Dorset, in southwest England in the area of the Mendip Hills.

A gorge is a kind of valley and Cheddar Gorge is one which has cut through layers of limestone to form it.

As you can see, this is spectacular in itself, but there is an attraction within the attraction:  a series of caves in the limestone and this is the sort of thing which Tolkien might have seen on his two visits—

which then inspired Gimli’s impassioned speech (which, by the way, is totally unnecessary to the plot, but which brilliantly illuminates (sorry!) Gimli’s character and adds to his growing friendship with Legolas, who, persuaded by the dwarf’s rhetoric, pledges to return to the caves with him—in return for visiting Fangorn Forest with Legolas).

For those who love cheese, there is another connection here, of course:  billed as “the world’s most popular cheese”, there is Cheddar, a tangy, solid variety, which seems to have originated—yes, in the village of Cheddar, just below the Gorge (and it has been suggested that some of the caves were used to age the cheese in the past).

In a left (or perhaps wrong) turn from Tolkien’s “the particular use in a particular situation of any motive, whether invented, deliberately borrowed, or unconsciously remembered that is the most interesting thing to consider”, I found that, once I made the association:  Caves of Aglarond, Cheddar Gorge, my next step was directly to Cheddar Cheese and, from there, to another English cheese, Wensleydale, made to the northeast, in Yorkshire.

And here’s where cheese and hobbits became intertwined with the characters most devoted to Wensleydale, Wallace and his skeptical dog, Gromit.

These are the brilliant stop-motion creations of Nick Park,

beginning with the pair’s first adventure, “A Grand Day Out” (1989)

in which, in search of a cheese holiday,

they visit the moon in a ramshackle rocket which Wallace (a part-time inventor) built for the trip.

Since then, they have had a number of adventures—“The Wrong Trousers” (1993), “A Close Shave” (1995), and “A Matter of Loaf and Death” (2008), all shorts, along with a feature-length film, “The Curse of the Were-Rabbit” (2005).  If you don’t know them, you can see “A Grand Day Out” for free at the wonderful Internet Archive:  https://archive.org/details/agranddayout_202001 and, if this delights you as much as it’s always delighted me, you can see more at the Archive under “Aardman Animations”, including a series of very short films highlighting some of Wallace’s inventions:  https://archive.org/details/94920

This is very much English humor:  wacky, but played straight, as if visiting the Moon in search of exotic cheese is a perfectly normal thing to do.  I don’t know if JRRT would have enjoyed Wallace and Gromit, but he says this of hobbits:

“…I am personally immensely amused by hobbits as such, and can contemplate them eating and making their rather fatuous jokes indefinitely…” (letter to D.A. Furth, 24 July, 1938, Letters, 49)

so perhaps the adventures of two eccentrics—well, one eccentric and one very sensible canine–

would tickle him.  As I was writing this, I discovered, however, that someone else had already made the association of Cheddar (Gorge) and Wallace and Gromit, at least–

Thanks for reading, as always,

Stay well,

Squirrel away, as Wallace does, Jacob’s Cream Crackers—you just shouldn’t run out,

And remember that there’s always

MTCIDC

O

PS

For more on Cheddar Gorge, see:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cheddar_Gorge   For more on Cheddar cheese see:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cheddar_cheese