Were Beacons Like In LOTR Ever Used To Communicate?

This was absolutely the case in Anglo-Saxon England, and it's actually what my PhD thesis is about. A lot of the Elizabethan beacon network is based on an Anglo-Saxon network later updated by Edward I. The Elizabethan antiquarian, historian and minister William Lambarde writes An Assesse of the Ancient Watch and Warde of our Ancestors where he chronicles a series of Anglo-Saxon coastguard beacons in Kent and Sussex, and as far as the Isle of Wight, which forms the basis of the planning for Elizabeth's system.

Unfortunately, the whole thing kind of gets forgotten about by historians until Andrew Reynolds' Landscapes of Defence and Baker and Brookes' Beyond the Burghal Hidage. They use earlier work by Hill and Sharpe (1997) and Gower (2003) which focus on the Old English toponyms tot and weard, which mean to watch and to ward or guard respectively. You can map out long networks of Toot Hills, or 'watching hills' along the English coast, and in my own thesis work, I found a similar network along the border between Anglo-Saxon Mercia and the Danelaw in the late ninth and early tenth centuries. Many places are still Toot Hills, and others have become places like Tottenham in London, Totnes in Devon or Totterdown (or totearndun meaning watchman's house hill) in Bristol.

The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle makes reference to signal fires being lit in times of conflict, and the Saga of Haakon the Good notes that when Haakon returned to take the throne of Norway having been fostered at the court of Æthelstan in England, he made many English style reforms to Norway including the institution of a beacon network.

What's interesting about many of these sites is that they were originally high-status Bronze or Iron Age burial sites with bowl barrows. Barrow-based burials were often placed where the interred could "see" over their dominion as they had in life, and so these were often hills which have extensive lines of sight over major routes and transport arteries. The barrows add an additional platform from which one can see even further, and often the Anglo-Saxons flatten the top and use them as platforms to build bonfires and watch-points. If they weren't present, usually the English built them, and often incorporated Iron Age hillforts into the network, sometimes completely rebuilding them like Eddisbury in Cheshire. In many cases the Victorians "preserved" the barrows by growing trees around them, so if you're driving though the English countryside and you see a high hilltop with a lone copse of trees at its apex, there's a very good chance that it's actually a bowl barrow and likely a signal station.