Monday 28th September 2026
Tolkien Memorial announced at Westminster Abbey
Westminster Abbey has announced that a major new artwork commemorating J.R.R. Tolkien will be unveiled in Poets’ Corner in Spring 2027—a fitting moment that will mark 90 years since the publication of The Hobbit and 50 years since The Silmarillion. The artwork will be installed near the memorial honouring Tolkien’s close friend and fellow writer, C.S. Lewis.
The memorial is generously supported by the Tolkien Estate and is being designed by artist Stephen Broadbent and his colleagues, in consultation with the Abbey’s Fabric Commission and the Tolkien Estate. It will be realised by designers, engineers and artisans at Silverlining Furniture in Wrexham.
The idea for a Tolkien memorial was first proposed to the Abbey by Lord David Alton during his time as Chairman of the Christian Heritage Centre (CHC) at Stonyhurst. CHC trustees Anton’ de Piro and Dr Rebekah Lamb-Varela, a scholar of religion and modern literature at the University of St Andrews, then took the proposal forward, establishing a Commissioning Group and inviting Professor Giuseppe Pezzini (University of Oxford), an expert on Tolkien, to lead it.
Working with the Tolkien Estate, the Abbey and its Fabric Commission, and Tolkien scholars from around the world, the Commissioning Group ran a competitive process and worked with Broadbent’s team to develop a design that would both complement the Abbey and provide an appropriate memorial to Tolkien.
The artwork’s inspiration is Tolkien’s Tree of Amalion—an image he drew and redrew throughout his life. The Tree does not appear in his legendarium but can be associated with Niggle’s Tree in Leaf by Niggle and the ‘Tree of Tales’ described in Tolkien’s essay On Fairy-Stories, first delivered as the Andrew Lang Lecture at the University of St Andrews on 8 March 1938.
The image will be vertically inlaid onto a stone pillar in the South Transept of Poets’ Corner, rising to 2.5 metres high. It is a striking expression of Tolkien’s creative process: as he put it, the ‘intricately knotted and ramified’ branches of the Tree of Tales represent the links between myths and stories across times and peoples, languages and cultures.
In Tolkien’s intricate drawings of the Tree of Amalion, each flower, fruit and leaf is unique. Some can be recognised as real plants, while others are entirely imagined. The abundance of distinct forms, bringing the familiar and the invented into harmony within a single tree, reflects Tolkien’s philosophy of story-making: the many held together by one common source, without losing their individuality.
The Tree of Amalion is also an image of the extraordinary and searching scope of the human capacity to make—a capacity Tolkien called ‘sub-creation’. For Tolkien, human creativity is a response to a prior divine gift, an act of working under God the Creator. We make because we have been made, creating within the world that has been gifted to us. As he wrote in On Fairy-Stories: ‘we make in our measure and in our derivative mode because we are made: and not only made, but made in the image and likeness of a Maker’.
Now, that vision of making—of stories branching, intertwining and flowering across generations—will itself take form at Westminster Abbey. ‘The CHC is proud to help preserve the United Kingdom’s cultural heritage. To honour Tolkien at Westminster Abbey is to recognise a writer of great imagination and deep faith whose work remains a lasting gift to generations to come,’ said Dr Rebekah Lamb-Varela, CHC trustee.
The CHC is especially pleased to have played a role, alongside its partners, including the Universities of St Andrews and Oxford, in initiating a project warmly welcomed by the Dean and Chapter of Westminster Abbey and the Tolkien family and Estate. It will provide a lasting contribution to the nation’s cultural heritage, honouring Tolkien’s extraordinary life and legacy.