Welsh Town Plans Festival for Tolkien Fans
 JRR TOLKIEN was the author of The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings.
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By EIFION WILLIAM
A conference, exhibition and fair celebrating the life and works of JRR Tolkien, author of Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit, will be held next August 13-15 in the mid-Wales town of Machynlleth.
The three-day festival will take place in the town’s historic Y Plas house and grounds and will cater to families as well as serious Tolkien fans.
There will be discussions on the Welsh influences on Tolkien’s works and presentations by speakers and artists, as well as a variety of stalls and entertainment.
The influence of the Welsh language on Tolkien’s writing has been well documented, not least by Tolkien himself.
In a BBC interview in 1971 he admitted that the names of persons and places in The Lord of the Rings were deliberately modelled on those of Welsh. “This element in the tale,” he said, “has given more pleasure to more readers than anything else in it.”
Tolkien often said that he first encountered the Welsh language on passing coal trucks while growing up in the English Midlands, describing the experience as “a flash of strange spelling and a hint of language old and yet alive.”
He later came to relish the sounds of Welsh words like adeiladwyd, awel, niwl and glas, many of which he later simulated in the languages of Middle Earth.
So taken was Tolkien with the Welsh language that he actually studied it at Exeter College, Oxford, saying that he did so because he believed the pleasure to be obtained from Welsh words could only be experienced by those who speak and understand it.
The Machynlleth Festival, called Festival in the Shire, was dreamed up by Mark Faith, a local bookseller specializing in Tolkien’s books.
He believes the success of the Lord of the Rings movies and the release over the next two years of two new Hobbit films make this an ideal time for a Tolkien festival. He hopes the Festival will become an annual event, bringing economic advantages to the area.
Tolkien would probably approve of Machynlleth as a setting for the festival. The town is set in the beautiful rural surroundings of the Dyfi Valley and has great historical significance for the people of Wales.
It was home in the Fifteenth Century to a short-lived Welsh Parliament under Owain Glyndwr, the last native-born Welshman to hold the title Prince of Wales.
Tolkien would also be pleased to hear so much Welsh spoken in the town, where a majority of residents still speak the language.
It would please him because, in his own words, “Welsh is of this soil, this island, the senior language of the men of Britain, and Welsh is beautiful.”
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