Evil Empire

And finally, here's a special one. It's Celebdil, one of the three peaks above Moria.
Well, why would this be special? Because this is not my own finding, but Tolkien's himself! He wrote to his son Michael in 1967, recalling a 1911 trip to Switzerland: 'I left the view of the Jungfrau with deep regret: eternal snow, etched as it seemed against eternal sunshine, and the Silberhorn sharp against dark blue: the Silvertine (Celebdil) of my dreams.' (quoted from The Lord of the Rings A Reader's Companion, HarperCollins, 2008, page 267)

Lauterbrunnen Valley - Rivendell in Swizterland

The text is from here http://scv.bu.edu/~aarondf/Rivimages/realriv.html

Marie Barnfield writes to tell me that she drew this conclusion (earlier and independently) some years ago in the 1990's and published an article in a Tolkien Society publication entitled The Lyfe ant the Auncestrye noting:

"not only the similarity between Tolkien's painting of Rivndell and the Lauterbrunnen, Valley, but also:
a) that Tolkien had visited Lauterbrunnen in 1911
b) that he had come down into the valley by an unusual route that extactly mirrors the rather perverse route his charaters insist on taking into Rivendell
c) That Lauterbrunnen essentially means the same as Greyflood & Hoarwell
d) That Tolkien mirrored the sound of the name Lauterbrunnen itself in the English and Elivsh names for the Rivendell river: ie Loudwater & Bruinen.

She also notes:
"I never got round to another article, but the Lauterbrunnen! valley appears again in Lord of the Rings as the valley of the Snowbourne in Rohan, with the Wengen area, and the Eiger, Monch and Jungrfrau, becoming respectively Dunharrow, and the three mountains at their back of which one was the haunted Dwimmorberg. If you sit and look at the valley walls from the Breithorn campsite, I swear you can see the Pukel-road."

This is copied from here http://tolkiengateway.net/wiki/J.R.R._Tolkien

In the summer of 1911, Tolkien went on holiday in Switzerland, a trip that he recollects vividly in a 1968 letter (Letters, no. 306), noting that Bilbo's journey across the Misty Mountains ("including the glissade down the slithering stones into the pine woods") is directly based on his adventures as their party of twelve hiked from Interlaken to Lauterbrunnen, and on to camp in the moraines beyond Mürren. Fifty-seven years later, Tolkien remembers his regret at leaving the view of the eternal snows of Jungfrau and Silberhorn ("the Silvertine (Celebdil) of my dreams"). They went across the Kleine Scheidegg on to Grindelwald and across the Grosse Scheidegg to Meiringen. They continued across the Grimsel Pass and through the upper Valais to Brig, and on to the Aletsch glacier and Zermatt.
http://www.tolkienforum.co.uk/Default.aspx?g=posts&t=1039