JRR Tolkien to join CS Lewis in Westminster Abbey’s Poets’ Corner

J.R.R. Tolkien, the devout Catholic author whose Christian beliefs helped shape The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, will be honored with a memorial in Poets’ Corner at London’s Westminster Abbey, alongside his close friend and fellow Christian writer C.S. Lewis.

Westminster Abbey announced that the memorial to the author, scholar, linguist and artist is scheduled to be unveiled during a dedication ceremony in spring 2027, coinciding with the 90th anniversary of The Hobbit and the 50th anniversary of The Silmarillion.

Tolkien and Lewis met while teaching at Oxford University and became lifelong friends. Both were central figures in the Inklings, an informal literary group whose members gathered to discuss ideas and read their works.

Lewis, the famed Narnia author, was among the few people familiar with The Hobbit before it was published. The Inklings, and Lewis in particular, reportedly encouraged Tolkien as he worked on the writings that became The Lord of the Rings.

Tolkien, who died in 1973 at age 81, remained a committed Catholic throughout his life, and his faith informed much of his storytelling.

The dean of Westminster, the Rev. David Hoyle, highlighted Tolkien’s Christian worldview in announcing the memorial.

“I am delighted both that there will be a memorial to J.R.R. Tolkien in the Abbey and that the memorial will be a thing of beauty," Hoyle said. "The Hobbit was read to me when I was a boy; when I was a little older, I read The Lord of the Rings, and then I read it again. We will remember here a master storyteller, a scholar, a man with a Christian imagination and a writer who helped some of us understand that a commitment to life and virtue might be costly and courageous."

Artist Stephen Broadbent designed the memorial, which will be installed vertically in a stone pillar in the abbey’s south transept. Inspired by Tolkien’s “Tree of Tales,” which he called the “Tree of Amalion,” the work will feature the image of a tree within a forest.

The memorial will be made mainly from native British woods and will include a piece of the black pine that once stood in the University of Oxford Botanic Garden. Known as “Tolkien’s tree,” the Pinus nigra was a favorite of the author during his years in Oxford and fell in 2014, according to the abbey.

“It has been a delight and honour to firstly imagine and then develop a memorial for Westminster Abbey that commemorates Tolkien’s literary enterprise and creative imagination,” Broadbent said. “The artwork will present to the viewer the sense of peering into another world: a ‘Forest of Stories’, with Tolkien’s remarkable ‘Tree of Tales’ accepted into the heart of it. Then through this magical forest there is an evocative glimpse to a land beyond.”

Tolkien spent much of his career at Oxford, where he taught Anglo-Saxon and Old and Middle English, and Old Norse. Beyond his academic work, the author, who spoke and studied more than 30 languages, created elaborate fictional histories, languages, alphabets, poetry, illustrations and stories.

The Hobbit, published in 1937, introduced readers to Middle-earth and was followed by The Lord of the Rings. More than 150 million copies of The Lord of the Rings have been sold, and the work has been translated into more than 35 languages and adapted for film and television.

Tolkien’s friendship with Lewis became one of the most significant literary relationships of the 20th century. Tolkien described Lewis in a 1964 letter as his “closest friend” for many years and said Lewis’ death in 1963 was “a grievous blow.”

Lewis, who also wrote the influential Christian works Mere Christianity and Surprised by Joy, received his own memorial in Poets’ Corner in 2013.

Poets’ Corner has honored Britain’s literary figures for centuries, with more than 100 poets and writers buried or commemorated there. They include William Shakespeare, Jane Austen, the Brontë sisters and Charles Dickens. More recent memorials include those honoring Lewis, Ted Hughes, Philip Larkin and P.G. Wodehouse.