Tolkien's Oxford (ft. Sam being a nerd)

“That sweet city with her dreaming spires/ She needs not June for beauty’s heightening.” – Matthew Arnold

Well hello! Happy Friday-before-Palm-Sunday! I'm slightly freaking out because I'm officially on Easter Break, which means I'm about to be catapulted into a World of Travel and won't see Sheffield again for another three weeks. (It's gonna be great! *slightly pained grin*) I am actually very excited but also the prospect of living out of an under-seat-item-sized backpack for three weeks is slightly painful. 

And speaking of travel...I GOT TO GO TO OXFORD LAST WEEKEND! 

It was superlative.

I'm obsessed.

I now have a conundrum because if I ever move to England long-term (which is somewhat unlikely but you never know) I don't know if I'd want to live in the Peak District or Oxford. Problematic, I tell you. 

Anyway. 

Oxford.

It was so amazing in so many ways that I'm going to need to devote multiple posts to it, and we're going to start here, with Tolkien's Oxford. Cuz I went full nerd and saw all the Tolkien things on this trip. 

I feel like I need to set the scene with Oxford Oxford for a minute here, so you can get the context of the city. I won't rave about it for too long, don't worry. We'll get to the nerdy Tolkien stuff very soon. 

When I got there, I got off the train and started walking into the city proper during a cloudburst, which lasted until I came out of the Oxford Oratory. But once the sun came out...my strongest memory of that day is coming upon the Radcliffe Camera suddenly, and seeing it swinging above me, huge, with the sun bursting behind it in the blue sky, dazzling. That was fantastic. And that somewhat sums up the rest of the trip, too. It was sunny the rest of the day Friday, and almost all of Saturday, and the sun in Oxford? It Hits Different. Most of the stone that the Colleges are built out of is some sort of golden sandstone-y material, and it almost glows in the sun. And looking up at all the sunlit spires towering above you? It's amazing. Because it really is the City of the Dreaming Spires. It's not just like 'a university town'...it's a town that's fully of all of these pseudo-monastic colleges that were built MANY HUNDREDS OF YEARS AGO. Just. Like. All over. And people still live and study in them, and...mmmph. I just can't. I love it so much. 

Also, because I'm God's Spoiled Brat apparently, I coincidentally went while the magnolias were blooming. 

And.

Y'all.

All I have to say about that is...at some point in your life, try to get to Oxford when the magnolias are blooming. 

Okay, but TOLKIEN.

For real this time. 

I started out my trip to Oxford with a visit to St. Giles Street, which contains on it not only the Eagle & Child (aka the Bird & Baby), the pub where the Inklings would often meet, but also the Lamb & Flag, which is just across the street and the other pub where the Inklings would meet regularly. (The Lamb & Flag evidently has a bee in their bonnet that they're never mentioned as an Inklings pub by Inklings nerds, the poor, um, lambs.) Oh, and also Blackfriars, the Dominican parish where Tolkien's friend and fellow Inkling Fr. Gervase Mathews, O.P. lived, and St. Aloysius Gonzaga, the parish that Tolkien most often attended, at least for a certain period of time.

It's a packed street. When I was coming out of Blackfriars from Mass on Saturday morning, an older man in a flat cap asked me if I was an Oxford Person, and when I said I wasn't, he told me that he was a retired Don from St. John's College (which is across the street from Blackfriars), and said that St. Giles Street was, in his opinion, the most beautiful street in the world. 

I'm inclined to agree. 

It also makes me smile to picture Fr. Gervase popping out of Blackfriars, perhaps wearing a flat cap (I passed a Dominican in the street in his habit and a flat cap, and it was inordinately delightful), and popping into the Bird & Baby to meet up with the rest of the Inklings.

Let's talk about Blackfriars for a second though! First of all, it's a beautiful church. As one of the Dominican I met up with there said, "Dominican architecture is based on Cistercian, you know." (Which I actually did know. And I love Cistercian architecture.) But second of all, according to this same Dominican, there are some Tolkien connections in the church. 

Because Tolkien's friend Fr. Gervase lived there, Tolkien would sometimes go and serve Mass for Fr. Gervase in one of the side altars that are set into the right wall of the church. There are three side altars, one for Mary, one for St. Dominic, and one for St. Thomas Aquinas. (For my non-Catholic readers: when I say that a side altar is 'for' a saint, I'm not saying that it's for worshiping that saint. It's not. It's for worshiping God, just like any other altar. The difference is more or less an aesthetic/devotional one, from my understanding, and partially has to do with what saint statue is placed above the side altar.) Apparently (and I say 'apparently', because the weekend I visited Oxford was the start of Passiontide, so the statues were veiled) the statue of St. Dominic at the side altar where Tolkien would most often assist at Mass has a very prominent star on his forehead. Even more prominent than usual. And my Dominican guide linked this to the description of (I think?) the Eldar as having 'light shining from their brows'. Which is pretty cool.

It seems a bit of a tenuous link, although I like it, but the other link seems (to me) much stronger. To whit: the Stations of the Cross (carved before Tolkien came to Oxford) contain the first known depictions of an orc. Not exactly an orc, of course, as those are Tolkien's creations, but definitely the Things Which Inspired Orcs. Because the sculptor who carved the beautiful bas-relief Stations decided to depict Jesus's executioners as un-human. With weirdly shaped heads and ears and knobby backs. And gosh do they look like orcs. One does get the impression that Tolkien would've been influenced thereof. (Although, as a friend of mine pointed out, making Jesus's executioners inhuman kind of loses the point that it was really our sinful humanity that killed Him. But we're not talking about theology, we're talking about orcs.)

So yeah! Blackfriars! (Also, can we TALK about the fact that there was a magnolia blooming right outside the clear window over the altar? Can we? God's Spoiled Brat, indeed.)

Just down the street from Blackfriars, as aforementioned, is the church of St. Aloysius Gonzaga, which was Tolkien's home parish for a good bit. (I don't know the exact dates because I don't have Holly Ordway's seminal works in front of me, much as I'd like to, but it was *waves hands in the air* at some point. Anywho.) I knew that it was his home parish, and I'd seen a picture of the interior, but when I got there I had no idea that it was actually the Oxford Oratory. 

Which made me super happy because, as I've observed before, although I don't know if I've done so on the blog, Tolkien felt about the Oratorian Fathers (an order more or less founded by St. John Henry Cardinal Newman on foundations laid by St. Philip Neri) as I feel about the Dominicans, vis. he grew up basically living in the Birmingham Oratory (and that's not an exaggeration, because after his mother died, an Oratorian Father was his legal guardian), becoming intimately familiar with their way of life, method of prayer, devotions, liturgy, and so on.

It makes so much sense that he'd go to the Oxford Oratory when he came to Oxford, just as much sense as it made for me to be at Blackfriars *tots up on fingers* five times while I was in Oxford. (Over the course of three days.)

Also, it's just a very beautiful church, in a totally different style than Blackfriars, and I like it very much. 

One of the things I was very much hoping to see while in Oxford was one of Tolkien's favourite trees, a Pinus nigra (Austrian or Black Pine) in the Oxford Botanical Garden. Sadly, I learned that it had to be taken down in 2014, but I did still get to see a black pine that's growing in the Botanical Garden from Rose Lane on my way back from Dead Man's Walk. It made me smile to think that it might've been already growing in Tolkien's time, and that perhaps it came from the same tree. 

Tolkien was associated with three of the Oxford Colleges, attending one and teaching at two others--Exeter, Pembroke, and Merton. Because I ended up being in Oxford during the Oxford Literary Festival, I wasn't able to get into either Exeter or Merton, although I would've liked to, although I did walk past them. And let me just say, Merton is very beautiful. Exeter is a bit more subtle, if I'm remembering correctly, but I am a fan of Merton. :) 

It's also very close to the famous Magdalen College, which was Lewis's academic home, and also the home of weekly Inklings meetings. I'm not sure how well known this is (probably very well-known among Tolkien/Lewis/Inklings nerds, and not anyone else) but the Inklings actually met twice a week, once a week at the Bird & Baby or Lamb & Flag, and once a week in Lewis's rooms at Magdalen. 

(Lewis's rooms are apparently ones to the right of the 'break' in the facade)

I really went to Magdalen to follow the tracks of Lewis (more on that in an upcoming post), but it also made me smile to see the windows of Lewis's rooms and think about the Inklings meeting there, or to think about Tolkien trundling through the Magdalen Cloister and across the lawns to get to Lewis's rooms in the New Building. 

My last two stops in my Tolkien-themed explorations of Oxford (there were other themes, too, it wasn't just Tolkien, for the record) were 20 Northmoor Road, and the Wolvercote Cemetery. 

20 Northmoor Road is the house where Tolkien lived with his family while he was writing The Hobbit and most of LOTR, i.e. from 1930 to 1947. It's in North Oxford, but not too far from the city centre and all of the colleges. Sadly, when I went to see it it was completely shrouded in scaffolding and plastic, probably for some sort of external repair. But I walked by and saw the street that he lived on, and the gardens, and the entrance and all. It made me smile. 

Wolvercote Cemetery, though, is where Tolkien and his wife Edith are buried. And going to see their grave was an Experience, with a lot of mixed emotions. 

The grave itself is one of the simpler graves I've ever seen, with only their names, their dates, but then also the word 'Luthien' under Edith's name, and 'Beren' under Tolkien's. <3 Over the actual grave part, there's a flower bed--when I was there, it was full of blooming daffodils and Lenten roses. Nearby, which made me smile, there are a whole bunch of Pinus nigra growing. I couldn't help but think that Tolkien would approve. 

It was very strange, though, and brought out a lot of the nature of death, to sit on the corner of the footstone (I didn't think they'd mind, and my legs were tired) and think about how Tolkien was here but also not here. I don't quite subscribe to the 'do not stand at my grave and weep, I am not there, I do not sleep' thing (although it's a beautiful poem) because Catholicism emphasizes that the human person is both soul and body. The body is not cast off like a worn set of clothes--your body is you, just as much as your soul, which is a reason to treat even a deceased body with great respect (and not scatter the ashes, but that's a theological discussion for a different day). So, in a sense, Tolkien was there, inasmuch as his body was. And thinking about that really brought home the reality of him-as-a-person. But he also wasn't there, because his soul is (God willing) in Heaven. (Or at least Purgatory.) It really brought home the innate tragedy of death, the separation of the body and soul in a way that was never intended. There was also a beauty to the visit, though, both in seeing the inscriptions and flowers and trees, but also in standing there and praying a decade of the Rosary (the Annunciation) for both of their souls, and also asking for their prayers, if they are now in Heaven (which I hope). 

So, so, so. 

It was a good visit. 

I hope all you wonderful people are doing well, and enjoyed hearing a bit about Tolkien and Oxford! It's always a good day when I get to exercise my nerdery thus. And I hope you have a very blessed Holy Week! It's coming up so fast!