Gimli was Welsh
Thinking about landscapes in Tolkien reminded me that Margaret Drabble spent a page or so discussing Tolkien in her book A Writer’s Britain. But whereas I was struck by the realistic, everyday landscapes in The Lord of the Rings, Drabble focuses on the more dramatic landscapes of war and environmental devastation. Drabble notes that Tolkien’s “many descriptions of wasted and ravaged lands are clearly drawn in part from his personal memories of trench warfare on the Somme in the First World War, but they also remind me irrestibly of scenes such as the slate quarries at Blaenau Ffestiniog and the burning mountains of slag in the Neath valley described a century earlier by George Borrow.”
She continues…
From childhood on, Tolkien was entranced by the Welsh language; even the names of Welsh railway stations on passing coaltrucks—Nantyglo, Blaen-Rhondda, Penrhiwceiber—seemed charged with magic and beauty, and his later studies of Early and Middle English literature reinforced his feeling for the landscapes that this language evoked. His woods of birch and alder, his Misty Mountains and Iron Mountains with their narrow passes, lonely meres, memorial cairns, and frowning walls of sheer rock cut by ancient road-builders, are very Welsh. The dwarves, ‘stone-hard, stubborn, fast in friendship and in enmity’, are the hard-working underground engineers and craftsmen of Middle-earth, called ‘Naugrim, the Stunted People, and Gonnhirrim, Masters of Stone’. They are the good spirits, as it were of the Industrial Revolution, and have ‘marvellous skill with metals and with stone; but in that ancient time iron and copper they loved to work, rather than silver or gold’ (The Silmarillion, Chapter Ten). The orcs and goblins, under the leadership of the wicked Sauron or Melkor, are the bad spirits, responsible for the hideous wasted plains of Gorgoroth, pocked with great craters, for the smoking chasms, and reeking furnaces of Mount Doom.
It seems very appropriate that the Welsh actor John Rhys-Davies was chosen to play Gimli in Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy—even though Rhys-Davies is actually taller than the actors who played Aragorn, Legolas, and Gandalf.
