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Image showing Vivienne Wilkes, Chairman of the 2012 weekend

Part five: Vivienne Wilkes

Vivienne Wilkes, chairman of the Middle Earth Weekend 2012 talks about the origins and increasing popularity of the event. Vivienne also discusses how Tolkien considered himself to be “a Birmingham man” and how various locations in South Birmingham left such a lasting impression on his childhood.

Video Transcription

My name is Vivienne Wilkes, I'm chairman of the Middle Earth Weekend Organising Committee, we have a whole team that put on this event. It's been going for thirteen years now, and it started off very small with just one tent and some face-painters and the reason it started at that time was because Tolkien lived in the area as a child, he only spent four years here, but it was a period of his life that he remembered for the rest of life as being very, very happy, and the Shire in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings is based on this area. Hence the Shire Country Park which was named to commemorate his presence here at Sarehole Mill. It was all very rural when he was a child, and not so many trees, I'm sure he would appreciate the number of trees there are now, and he lived very close - 264 Wake Green Road and he would have a clear view across the mill pool at that time, and no trees in the way at all to the Mill. And we did, at one point think it would be nice to acknowledge his presence here in Sarehole, so we had a Tolkien weekend and it's got bigger and bigger each year, and we then changed it to Middle Earth Weekend. I have had one or two people say they thought it was just for Tolkien fans and I said; no its a family festival, it's nice for everybody to come, youngsters, any age and we've got enough variety here now for people of any age. Fans come from all over the country and local families come, we've had people coming down from Scotland, American visitors who are over here and found out about us, it's become very, very popular and its nice that Birmingham acknowledges his contribution to our literature.

We're very pleased that we can do this on the behalf of Tolkien and we're very proud that he liked Sarehole so much as a child. He considered himself a Birmingham man, even though he was born in South Africa, he was from only four years but he considered them to be the happiest time of his life, and all his stories blossom from his time here in Birmingham. He had so much freedom, this was rural countryside and he and his brother, they were only young but they could roam all over the place around here and it lodged in his memory for the rest of his life.

This year is the seventy-fifth anniversary of The Hobbit being published and so we thought we'd take that as our theme this year, very important for Tolkien lovers and also the films that are coming out this year and next year of The Hobbit by Peter Jackson - so that's a nice coming together. We feel we're trying to raise the image of his importance to Birmingham, I mean he's won so many awards; the BBC Award Best Novel, Best Tale if you like, Best Book. But there are a lot of people in Birmingham who seem to appreciate what we have here. We have people come from all over the world and all over the country who know about Tolkien's presence in Birmingham, after all he lived in nine different homes in Birmingham before he went to Oxford. So he's very important to Birmingham and it's nice to actually do something to raise that profile, because there's nobody else doing it at the moment. So we're very grateful to have the chance to have our say and stress the importance of Tolkien to Birmingham.

We're very proud that Tolkien had that presence in Birmingham and that the area was so important to him as a child and he could roam here quite freely, and like perhaps children today, he and his brother wandered along the River Cole, through the fords and this area had a profound impact on his stories, after all the mill is the mill in Hobbiton. We have the fords and the Ford of Bruinen where the black riders were carried away, and in fact if you've ever watched the River Cole in flood you can easily understand how his imagination would have worked at that time, because cars do get carried away and he would have loved it, I'm sure after a storm and so, it's just a pleasure to be able to put on an event like this.

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