HistoryToday.com has published the fascinating story of a golden ring from Roman Britain and of two Pembroke College, Oxford, professors who were part of the effort to trace its origins. What’s intriguing about it, at least for serious readers of fantasy fiction, is that these two professors were R. G. Collingwood, archaeologist and dean of metaphysics, and J. R. R. Tolkien, he-who-needs-no-introduction. From the article ‘The Inspiration for Tolkien’s Ring:’

So how much did this story of a lost Roman gold ring influence Tolkien’s fiction? Silvianus loses his gold ring at Lydney, as Gollum lost his under the Misty Mountains. Silvianus believes his ring has been stolen by someone whose name he knows – Senicianus – just as Gollum thinks his ring has been stolen by Bilbo Baggins. Silvianus curses by name the person he suspects. Similarly, when Gollum works out that Bilbo has found and kept his ring, he cries out in rage: ‘Thief, thief, thief! Baggins! We hates it, we hates it, we hates it forever!’ Both Gollum and Silvianus know the identity of the persons they regard as thieves who have stolen their gold rings and both declare these names with maledictions.

However the relationship between Tolkien and Collingwood may have gone deeper. Collingwood’s developing approach to the philosophy of history may have appealed to Tolkien, who once declared that he much preferred history ‘true or feigned’. From 1926 onwards Collingwood was working on the theories that would become his book The Idea of History, in which he proposes the importance of objects as vectors for understanding and imaginatively recreating given historical events – pure gold ring territory.

Do read the whole thing.  My only quibble is the authors’ assertion that the years 1928-1929 were the years in which the form of The Hobbit was taking final shape.” Tolkien doesn’t begin the composition of The Hobbit until 1930 according to the accepted history and writes more than half of it in the months just before publication in 1936 and 1937. That would be the year that he read Williams’ Place of the Lion, a ring composition, when his and CSL’s ideas of what was possible in modern day story telling was re-shaped (re-forged?). For more on that pivotal year, see Bruce Charlton’s notes online in ‘The Notion Club Papers.’