Finding the Cottage of Lost Play

[Huinesoron]

Originally Posted by Priya

Splendid theory! Well done!

Matches well with Letter #181 (from The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien, Edited by H. Carpenter, 1981) where after talking about his youth in being brought up in (Sarehole) a semi-rural village in Warwickshire, Tolkien adds:

“I take my models like anyone else - from such ‘life’ as I know.”

Having driven across the Barrow-Downs and seen exactly how hard it is to figure out where you are or which way you're going, he definitely did!

While I had BoLT out anyway, I went through and put all the Eressea locations on a map:

The Lonely Isle

The saddest thing about all this is reading over and over again Tolkien waxing lyrical about the elms of Warwick. Those are all gone now, victims of the Dutch Elm Disease that arrived in the 1970s. I rather hope Tolkien didn't live long enough to see the elms of Kortirion felled.

hS