Sarehole Mill is four miles south of the centre of Birmingham. If this were a fairy tale, and it should be, it would follow that Birmingham swallowed Sarehole a century ago, like a dragon and its prey. I like Birmingham: I like its optimism, its violence and its multiplex, which can match any American Midwest mall in competitive dystopia and idiocy. Birmingham has energy, and that swallowed Sarehole, but unfortunately for Birmingham, there was a writer who cared: John Ronald Reuel Tolkien.Sarehole was his childhood palace, and now, more reluctantly I would imagine, his memorial pizzeria.

A whimsical restaurant review grappling Tolkien would normally visit the Eastgate Hotel on Merton Street, Oxford, a gloomy inn next to the college where he taught philology while writing The Lord of the Rings. There is something insatiably unhappy about the Eastgate, as if the Boer War were ongoing. Even so, Tolkien liked it, and he ate there when he lived next door at no. 21. But this column is more ambitious, and so it travels to Sarehole: to (J.R.R. Tolkien’s) Pizza in the Courtyard. There are no novelty names here, no Smaug Laketown Hot. This is not the Brontë Balti in Haworth. Tolkien was an Englishman.

Sarehole Mill is 18th-century and red-brick, with a tower and a bright green pond. It sits on the foundations of an older building, which milled from 1542, the year that Henry VIII chopped his young wife Catherine Howard’s head off, if you cannot mark the date. It is now a museum.

The entrance is less Middle-earth than Narnia, though I have always found Narnia more flimsy and less believable than Hobbiton: talking lions are stupid. Even so, one moment you are on a tepid suburban bus route, and suddenly you are in the crucible fire of Tolkien’s imagination, which feels unimaginably peaceful. He lived in a nearby villa between the ages of four and eight with his mother and brother – his father was already dead – and he learned botany and drawing, and he trespassed here.

The pizzeria is a tiny room between the courtyard and the mill pond. It is comfortingly ordinary, as he wished to be, and was, until diabetes took his mother, and the Great War took his friends. You might hope for a replica of the Inn at Bree – well, I did – but this is calmer and more original than a themed restaurant, though it sometimes hosts groups of people dressed as hobbits. I hope they come on the bus. There is a cuttings book that tells that Tolkien contributed to the renovation of the mill: he tended his own memory. He never forgot Sarehole and the tree – a willow – whose death made him cry. If Hobbiton exists – and you must read John Garth’s definitive guide to Tolkien and place if you seek, if you are curious – it is here.

Pizza, then: there are all the common types. I eat a Margherita and my husband has what I persist in calling a Smaug Laketown Hot, though it clearly isn’t, being a pepperoni. Both are much better than they need to be.

This restaurant fulfils two of my favourite criteria: singularity and weirdness. This is my homage. There is something both hopeful and des-pairing about a man who wrote in the nursery of the British state and thought: I will people it with elves and talking trees, and with villains who are nothing like dons, and its hero will be tiny and keen on waistcoats. (Tolkien was 5ft 8½in, tall enough.) This is his memorial pizzeria, and I am glad I came here. I like it, though I fear that he would not.