Even at a conservative and sceptical estimate, England as a political community is more than a millennium old. Æthelstan, the grandson of Alfred the Great, was recognised as ‘King of the English’ in a ceremony at Eamont in Cumbria in AD 927. A charter dated the following year describes him as rex Anglorum, the first appearance of the title.

Is it because of this great antiquity, or in spite of it, that there has been down the centuries such fierce debate over the nature and identity of England and the English? No other major European country can trace a similarly unbroken and coherent lineage: not France, not Germany, Italy, Spain, nor Poland.

States can be defined in a variety of ways, often to suit political and ideological prejudices: ethnicity and language, religious confession, geographical borders, political institutions. Any of these frameworks can be imposed on England, but none will fit exactly. Its Anglo-Saxon antecedents were created by an influx of migration from northern Europe, and modern English as a language has evolved over several iterations to became truly universal only in the 17th century. The English moved from Catholicism to Protestantism and only a minority now identify as Christian at all.

We can, however, discern a sense of England and Englishness, a kind of mystical adherence to the nation, in the thoughts and writing of two intensely scholarly men with roots in the Midlands. They were born 20 years apart, in the heyday of Empire, both attended King Edward’s School in Birmingham, and they shared an academic interest and considerable professional eminence in the philology of ancient languages. Each would become a professor at a young age. To find the common elements of their conceptualisation of England, we have to explore their words carefully. But there are striking parallels between the visions of the English nation expressed by J.R.R. Tolkien and Enoch Powell.

Tolkien had been born in Bloemfontein in the Orange Free State, but had grown up in Sarehole in Worcestershire and then in Edgbaston after first his father then his mother died. Nearby Birmingham was booming as one of the country’s industrial powerhouses, from a population of 478,113 in 1891 to 522,204 in 1901 and 840,202 in 1911, the year Tolkien went up to Exeter College, Oxford. He hated the dark, fiery urban centres of the Black Country, and when he came to write The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, they were the model for Mordor, the bleak realm of Sauron.

By contrast, the Worcestershire countryside in which Tolkien grew up was idealised as the peaceful, bucolic Shire. As Brian Rosebury put it in Tolkien: A Cultural Phenomenon (2003): ‘Sarehole, with its nearby farms, its mill by the riverside, its willow-trees, its pool with swans, its dell with blackberries, was a serene quasi-rural enclave, an obvious model-to-be for… Hobbiton and the Shire.’

This was the last gasp of pre-mechanical Victorian England. Manufacturers and merchants had overtaken landowning aristocrats as the richest class, and the 1851 census had shown that, for the first time, more than half of the population of England and Wales lived in towns and cities rather than urban areas. By 1911, it was nearly 80 per cent. What Tolkien immortalised as the Shire was already becoming the past.

The Shire was a place of calm, undemonstrative order and deep roots. By the beginning of The Hobbit, it had been settled for 1,300 years (‘Shire Reckoning 1341’), and was exclusively the domain of hobbits, or ‘Shire-folk’. There were three types of hobbit: Harfoots, Fallohides and Stoors, but the three groups had intermixed, albeit unevenly, over centuries. Fundamentally, the Shire was an ethnically homogenous land with a system of governance that touched lightly on the population: the thain, an office held hereditarily by the head of the Took clan, was largely ceremonial, with practical matters largely left to the mayor of Michel Delving, the Shire’s capital, and 12 shirriffs.

Powell, born in the Birmingham suburb of Stechford then raised in Kings Norton, had once been an arch-imperialist. Enlisting as a private soldier in the Royal Warwickshire Regiment shortly after the Second World War began, he was swiftly selected to be an officer and would rise swiftly to the rank of brigadier. In 1943 he had been posted to the Indian Army as a lieutenant-colonel in military intelligence, and he fell in love with British India. He studied the Urdu language and its literature, and his ambition was to become viceroy of India.

When the prime minister, Clement Attlee, announced in February 1947 that Viscount Mountbatten of Burma would become the new viceroy and would oversee independence by no later than June 1948, Powell was profoundly shocked. He walked the streets of London all night, absorbing the news, but in his characteristic and absolutist way he stripped himself at that point of any remaining notion of imperial glory. If British India would soon be gone, then so, too, would Britain’s status as a world power, and the country should be reimagined accordingly.

If former British colonies were to become independent, then in Powell’s mind they were fully so, free and autonomous, no longer the concern of the government in London. He regarded the Commonwealth as an intellectually dishonest pale imitation of the Empire, and instead conceived of Britain – despite his Welsh antecedents, he really meant England – as a unitary state, a patria, an ancient community bound by loyalty to the Crown and to nothing and no-one else. This underlay his implacable opposition to the European Economic Community, membership of which would be the cause of his rupture with the Conservative Party in 1974.

What was ‘England’ for Powell? On 20 April 1961, St George’s Day, when he was minister of health under Harold Macmillan, he gave a speech to the Royal Society of St George, in which he spoke, lyrically and with great passion, of his sense of nation. England had not been subsumed into or erased by her colonial reach but endured, at ‘the heart of a vanished empire, amid the fragments of demolished glory’. Powell described the way in which Englishness could be traced back over centuries, intricately intertwined with history, language, landscape and architecture, but above all defined by allegiance to kingship. Imagining his forebears of the early Middle Ages, he said:

The kingship would have seemed to them, as it seems to us, to express the qualities that are peculiarly England’s: the unity of England, effortless and unconstrained, which accepts the unlimited supremacy of Crown in Parliament so naturally as not to be aware of it; the homogeneity of England, so profound and embracing that the counties and the regions make it a hobby to discover their differences and assert their peculiarities; the continuity of England, which has brought this unity and this homogeneity about by the slow alchemy of centuries.

There we have the hallmarks of Powell’s vision of England. It was a nation united under the Crown in Parliament, shaped by a sense of its own long history, by ‘the fields amid which they built their halls, their cottages, their churches… the rivers, the hills and of the island coasts of England’. And it was a nation not of differentiation but of homogeneity.

If we look at Tolkien’s Shire, a metaphorical England, compared to Powell’s conceptualisation of the English nation, there are striking parallels. Both are ancient and consciously steeped in their traditions, geographically insular and separate, using a single dominant language, subject to an hereditary authority and largely populated by a single ethnic or racial group.

(Powell would become notorious for his views on race, immigration and integration, but Tolkien, too, has been criticised for his presentation of race and ethnicity in Middle-earth.)

These were all elements of a more substantial whole, however. Tolkien’s Shire and Powell’s England were in some ways feats of imagination, mystical communions among populations who shared so many features that they were bound tightly together almost unconsciously; ‘so naturally as not to be aware of it’, in Powell’s words.

They were defined both positively and negatively, their peoples drawing distinct identities both from who they were and what they shared, but also who they were not, their sense of being separated from the rest of the world: England, as Shakespeare said, a ‘fortress built by Nature for herself’, the Shire bounded by the River Brandywine, the Hills of Evendim and the Far Downs. At a public meeting in Bromley in 1963, Powell argued that England ‘looks inwards, as a community to its own members; it looks outwards as a nation, into a world populated by other societies, like or unlike itself’.

J.R.R. Tolkien was born in 1892, Enoch Powell in 1912. Yet both of them framed England not as an imperial power but something less expansive, more compact and intimate. They were turning away from Empire, but, unlike many progressive champions of decolonisation, they looked to the past rather than the future for an identity. They were not seeking to build Jerusalem but to rediscover what had long existed. Tolkien often called himself an anarchist, while Powell was a Tory to the marrow of his bones, but they shared a belief in England that was shaped fundamentally by its past.