Tolkien memorial for Poets’ Corner will include wood from an Oxford pine he loved

Westminster Abbey will unveil a memorial to J.R.R. Tolkien in Poets’ Corner in spring 2027, 90 years after The Hobbit first appeared in print.

Its design draws on the Tree of Tales, which Tolkien called the Tree of Amalion, and shows a lone tree within a forest. The artwork will stand 2.5 metres tall, fitted vertically into a stone pillar in the south transept.

Wood from Tolkien’s tree in Oxford

Native UK timber makes up most of the piece. One section comes from a black pine, a Pinus nigra, that became known as “Tolkien’s tree”. The writer counted it as a favourite during his Oxford years. It was felled at the Oxford University Botanic Garden in 2014.

Scholars who study Tolkien helped shape the design, and the Tolkien Estate was consulted as it developed. The build falls to Silverlining Furniture in Wrexham, whose designers and engineers will work alongside its craftspeople.

David Hoyle, the Dean of Westminster, said he was delighted that the abbey would gain a Tolkien memorial and that it would be “a thing of beauty”. Speaking of the author, he said: “We will remember here a master storyteller, a scholar, a man with a Christian imagination.”

Who else is remembered in Poets’ Corner

Readers have come to Poets’ Corner as pilgrims for centuries. Over 100 writers and poets lie there or are honoured with a memorial. The name properly belongs to the eastern aisle of the south transept, though burials and memorials now fill the rest of it too.

Some of those remembered are known around the world. Shakespeare is there, as are Charles Dickens and Jane Austen, with the Brontë sisters alongside them. The newest memorials to writers honour PG Wodehouse and Philip Larkin, as well as C.S. Lewis and Ted Hughes. Tolkien was a devout Roman Catholic, but Poets’ Corner is open to people of every faith and of none.