No one will believe you are going to Middle Earth. Most visitors arrive in Zurich ready to shop on Bahnhofstrasse and sightsee in the Niederdorf old town. Or they use the Swiss city as a jumping-off point to explore the resorts of St Moritz, Klosters or Davos.
But head southwest, past the misty mountains and jagged peaks that tower over the city of Lucerne and the lake town of Interlaken, and up the deeply cloven valley that winds from Lake Thun into the heart of the Bernese Oberland region – and with a little imagination you could find yourself staring into the verdant Elvish valley of Rivendell or in the middle of a huffing and puffing Hobbit walking party.
That’s because the steep-sided cliffs, glacial grottoes and fertile dells of forests and wildflowers were the true inspiration for JRR Tolkien’s Middle Earth sagas: The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. Naturally, the stunning Alpine villages of Lauterbrunnen, Grindelwald and Wengen – and the soaring Eiger, Monch and Jungfrau peaks that guard them – are not some sort of hidden secret; travellers have been exploring these valleys since the Berner Oberland Bahn railway opened in 1890. But their role in the creation of Tolkien’s fantastical Middle Earth epic is less known. The author acknowledged as much in the 1950s in a little-known letter to his son, Michael. “From Rivendell to the other side of the Misty Mountains,” he wrote, “the journey... including the glissade down the slithering stones into the pine woods... is based on my adventures in Switzerland in 1911.”
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