Morris Motors boss may have inspired Tolkien villain

Telegraph

30-05-2025

The fascist-sympathising founder of Morris Motors was demonised as a soulless industrialist in an unknown story by JRR Tolkien that is to be published for the first time.
William Morris, Viscount Nuffield, is thought to have inspired the Lord of the Rings author to create a villain for a satirical fantasy in which he vented his loathing for the motor car and its devastating impact on his beloved Oxford.
Morris made his fortune by mass-producing small cars at affordable prices and, although he donated millions to worthy causes, he also supported Oswald Mosley's British Union of Fascists.
Morris Motors became the major employer in the region during Tolkien's lifetime, providing a pull for workers and businesses supporting the car industry. A dramatic rise in Oxford's population between the wars was driven partly by the growth of the industry.
The businessman is thought to be the inspiration for a character known as the Daemon of Vaccipratum in the never before published story, The Bovadium Fragments.
It is thought Tolkien also took inspiration from a planning controversy that erupted in the 1940s, when he was the University of Oxford's Professor of English Language and Literature at Merton College.
A bid to alleviate traffic by building a dual carriageway across Christ Church Meadow, an ancient open space in the heart of Oxford, sparked a protracted public debate well into the 1960s, when the plan was eventually aborted.
The Bovadium Fragments reflects Tolkien's mastery of Latin. Bovadium was the Latinised name for the village of Oxford, and the Daemon of Vaccipratum translates as 'the demon of the cow pasture', or Cowley – where Morris had established his motor manufacturing plant.
In one passage of the unearthed story, Tolkien writes: 'But it came to pass that a Daemon (as popular opinion supposed) in his secret workshops devised certain abominable machines, to which he gave the name Motores.'
The Bovadium Fragments was among Tolkien manuscripts either donated or deposited posthumously by his estate to Oxford's Bodleian Library. It will be published in October by Harper Collins.
Chris Smith, the Harper Collins publishing director, described it as 'a sharply satirical account of the perils of allowing car production and machine-worship to take over your town, where things ultimately all go to hell, in a very literal sense'.
Tolkien's son and literary executor, Christopher, had edited the text before his death in 2020.
The book will include an essay by Richard Ovenden, Bodley's librarian, who has conducted extensive research into the planning controversy, having established its inspiration for Tolkien's story.
Mr Ovenden said it is about a scholar in the future looking at evidence of a society that is now lost, having 'worshipped the motor car', adding: 'Tolkien was deeply affected by the way that the motor industry was changing his city, and that shines through.'
Asked why The Bovadium Fragments had not been published before, Mr Ovenden said: 'Christopher's priority in publishing his father's unpublished works was on the Middle Earth-related material. This material didn't really fit with that or with his father's more scholarly pieces, and so it got left.
'I would visit Christopher and his wife Baillie in France every year. On one of those visits, he drew this to my attention and said, 'What's all this about, what do you think the background of this was?''
Mr Ovenden described it as 'a contribution to environmental literature and the conservation of historic cities'. 'It was written in the late 1950s and 1960s, but it has this extraordinary contemporary resonance,' he said.