The tribute will be revealed at a dedication ceremony in Spring 2027, 90 years after the publication of The Hobbit and 50 years after The Silmarillion.

It will join Tolkien with his close friend and fellow writer C.S. Lewis, already commemorated in the Abbey’s south transept.

The Very Reverend Dr David Hoyle, Dean of Westminster, said: “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.

“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.”

The memorial will stand 2.5 metres tall and will be inlaid into a stone pillar in the south transept.

Designed by artist Stephen Broadbent, the artwork is inspired by Tolkien’s Tree of Amalion and will feature the image of a tree in a forest.

Mr Broadbent said: “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.

“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.

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“Then through this magical forest there is an evocative glimpse to a land beyond.”

The memorial will be constructed mainly from native British woods and will include a piece of the black pine known as “Tolkien’s tree,” which once stood in the Oxford University Botanic Garden.

Mark Boddington of Silverlining Furniture, the firm producing the memorial, said: “Given Tolkien’s love of trees and craftsmanship, it is especially gratifying that the Abbey and the Tolkien Estate’s vision for the memorial, together with Stephen’s richly evocative design, will be brought to life using locally sourced timbers and a blend of traditional and innovative British craftsmanship, creating a work that visitors to the Abbey can admire and appreciate for generations to come.”

Tolkien, best known for The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, spent most of his life as a distinguished academic at Oxford University, where he taught Old and Middle English, and Old Norse.

Poets’ Corner is the final resting place or memorial site of more than 100 writers, including Shakespeare, Jane Austen, and Charles Dickens.

Recent additions include tributes to Ted Hughes, Philip Larkin, and P.G. Wodehouse.