Beren’s Hill

The new John Garth talk ““An Entirely Vain and False Approach”: Literary Biography and why Tolkien was wrong about it” reveals he’s found a Berin’s Hill, at Ipsden in Oxfordshire. Which Garth says is the place where Tolkien’s Birmingham Oratory good friend Fr. Vincent Reade came from, and where Reade’s family was the ‘head family’ of the village. Garth also says it was near to the location of the Birmingham Oratory’s boarding school, and my consultation of a map shows the proximity was some five or six miles.

I find that a 1919 Little Guide’s guide to Oxfordshire (reprinted from the 1906 first edition) has it that the hill name “preserves the name of St. Birinus”. Birinus (d. 649 or 650AD) was a man who would offer Tolkien a saint potentially bridging, in his lifetime, the old Christianity of the Roman Empire and the later British Christianity. As such the name and its apparent place-affiliation would certainly have interested Tolkien, and the connection would certainly have been relayed to him by the learned Fr. Vincent Reade.

The book Saint Berin, the apostle of Wessex (1902) has it all, bar any later tweaks. St. Birinus was sent by Asterius (Archbishop of Milan) to “scatter the seeds” of the faith and convert Mercia. But on crossing the channel and landing he was permanently stalled among the West Saxons, after discovering that they were still utterly pagan (he had been told otherwise).

The author gives an interesting link with Cornwall, while first exhaustively trying to establish and divine the forms of the name. His name and saint’s day were documented as venerated at St. Micheal’s Mount in Cornwall, before the 13th century and probably well before — since an 867 A.D. Canterbury calendar in the Bodleian also has the saint’s day. This would give Reade and Tolkien a good reason to have visited St. Micheal’s Mount on their visit to Cornwall in 1914. I couldn’t place them there in my recent book-chapter on the visit, though the Mount was within sight from the cliffs and was ‘just around the corner’ from where they were staying.

The book linked above also saves Tolkien scholars looking for the name’s meaning, since… “Birinus is meaningless in English”. It was a Latinization of some Frankish or perhaps Lombardic name. The author favours Lombardy for the name, but many other sources have the saint as “probably” Frankish. After some deliberation the author leads us (nearly) to the likely name of Beorn. Hmmm, that sounds rather familiar…

“The name, therefore, is most probably Teutonic [Germanic], and the same that becomes in the Scandinavian form Biorn” and he offers a quote from Baring-Gould… “Probably Bjorn or Baerin or Berin, a compound expressive of Bear in some form, High or Low German”.

Which rather voids the hill, regrettably, since this means that Tolkien could have had his Beren name simply from ‘Bear’, with the implication of ‘warrior’. Though in Tolkien’s Noldorin Beren means “bold”. Similar.

Of Berin’s Hill in Oxfordshire the 1906 book usefully gives a description…

“From the foot of it two remarkable tracks, hollowed out to the depth of some feet in the chalk, diverge on either side of the modern roadway which has superseded them, and meet again upon the summit. The villagers say that before the road was made, half-a-century ago, one of these hollow ways was used for ascent, and the other for descent. Whatever may be the true explanation of their form, there can be no doubt of their extreme antiquity. At the point where they meet again upon the hill-top they enclose a pair of earth-circles, each with a shallow surrounding trench. In the wood below, a few yards from the double track, is an ancient well, to which common belief and the judgment of antiquaries agree in assigning a Roman origin. Numerous coins also, from Claudius to Constantius, have been found here, and various Roman remains exist abundantly all around […] Berin’s Hill is upon the Chilterns, where certainly the Briton lingered long after he had been driven from the neighbouring valley. All along these hills we find a trace of the older language in the hollow “combes”…”

The author draws partly on “Ms. notes by the late Mr. Edward Anderdon Reade of Ipsden House”, on the hill and the history of its name. Presumably an older relative of Fr. Reade.

The well was explored and dug by local archaeologists in 1969, and their report noted “the well had been explored by Mr E. Reade [1807-1886] about 100 years ago” (SOAG Bulletin 62, “The ‘Roman Well’ near Ipsden”). The 1969 digs found a wealth of material including “one 2nd-century Roman sherd decorated with combing”, but the Roman claim is still lacking structural evidence.