Station Zero

I’m in the middle of re-reading The Lord of the Rings : behold my half-baked thoughts and unconfirmed speculations. There was once a young man from Birmingham who, dismayed by the ugliness and industrialisation of the modern age, fell in love with fairy tales and legends. In later life he would devote himself to the creation of a distinctive imaginary world, where noble and beautiful characters inhabited dream-like landscapes. His name was Edward Burne-Jones , and he was the star of the second wave of the Pre-Raphaelite movement. His paintings are what I think of whenever The Lord of the Rings starts to get a bit Elfy. The Golden Stair by Sir Edward Burne-Jones I don’t know if Burne-Jones's pictures were what Tolkien was thinking of, but I’m pretty sure they’re in the mix somewhere. The Pre-Raphaelites sold well to the newly wealthy merchants and industrialists of the midlands and the north country, so there would have been plenty of examples of their work in Birmingh...