Mythmakers Encore: Things You Don't Know About Tolkien, C.S. Lewis and Oxford

Welcome to Mythmakers. This is the podcast for fantasy fans and creatives, brought to you by the Oxford Centre for Fantasy. My name is Julia Golding, a writer and director of the Centre. I'm actually speaking to you from the city of Oxford, famously the home of J.R.R. Tolkien, creator of Middle Earth, as well as C.S. Lewis, the creator of Narnia. And as promised, today we're going to look at some facts about both these writers associated with the city that you might not know. Now, of course, there are many excellent academics out there who spend their lives studying both these writers, as well as self-taught experts like Stephen Colbert, And of course, the filmmakers down in New Zealand who know a thing or two about the world of Lord of the Rings. But there is part of the story of both these writers that is best understood by sitting right here in their city. Today, we're going to think about how both these writers interacted with Oxford. We're going to pop the bubble of some myths that have grown up because a lot of hearsay about them. And I'd also suggest some new parts of that jigsaw puzzle to fit into the myth that is the Inklings living in Oxford in the middle of the last century. Now, where are we going to start? Well, first of all, I thought we would start with the Inklings themselves and their famous meetings that they used to have once or twice a week in Oxford. Now, if you come to Oxford, most people will say that the Inklings were, read their work to each other in the Eagle and Child pub on St Giles, a pub that's locally known as the Bird and Baby. As a little bit of a sidebar for this, there's a little bit of a sad story here in that the Eagle and Child pub, where I used to go to very recently, is now shut. It's been bought up to be developed. The site is becoming a boutique hotel. Hopefully they'll reopen the ground floor and have it working as a pub again. But at the moment, the doors are shut. Yes, the way is shut and it's no good standing outside saying, Melon, you will not be allowed in. Anyway, this story about the eagle and child is a bit misleading. Because though they did meet there for regular discussions, it was more, well, it was a public place. So that was where they would go and debate and argue and drink beer and smoke. But the actual sharing of the work usually happened in a more private setting in C.S. Lewis's rooms in Maudlin College, which is across town. And it's a quiet place where they could control, you know, how loud everything was. chat without interruption. I mean, if you think about it, it stands to reason that they're less likely to be reading fiction in public, even in a sort of snug room in the pub. They would probably be much happier in a place where they knew they weren't going to be overheard. But anyway, we've lived with this myth for a long while, and I used to cycle past the eagle and child and sort of tell myself that story. So I've now had to readjust my frame of what actually went on there. No doubt, it was great evenings. And the other sort of myth, it's not repeated in the biographies of the writers, but it is a sort of town lore about it, is that that was the pub. Actually, they went to many pubs in the local area, some of which are still pubs. The one across the road, the Lamb and Flag, was where they would go when the beer ran out. That too, I'm afraid, is closed. Part of this is COVID impact and the lack of tourists. But also there is a general dying away of pubs in the UK because there are an awful lot of them and some of them aren't surviving. So we'll have to see what becomes of that building. And actually when you think about the nature of these Inkling meetings down the pub, One thing that strikes me now is just how regular, how much time these gentlemen were able to give to such meetings. And I fill in the story behind them of those inkling widows, so to speak, around Oxford, no doubt cooking the supper and preparing the kids' tea. It was a boys club. And maybe that's part of the reason why Lord of the Rings is thought of instinctively as a group of men of all different races going on an adventure. I think it's interesting that C.S. Lewis, certainly in his children's fiction, makes a real effort to involve women. So well done, C.S. Lewis. Now, the second fact I wanted to explore today was about Oxford as the backdrop to the life of these writers. When I say that to you, I imagine most of you are sitting there thinking of the university, the quads, the libraries, the gargoyles, the churches. It is a beautiful city and very green. Yeah. But it's not quite like that when you live here. The university is a world of its own and is largely lived in by students. Both Lewis and Tolkien didn't live in university accommodation in their maturity when they had their family homes. And I wanted to explain how different it is living not right in the heart of the university. So first of all, let's think about C.S. Lewis, where he lived in the kilns. That's located in what was then, and still is to a certain extent, more of a satellite village to Oxford, in the Risinghurst, Headington Quarry area of the city, which is over towards the east. It's on the road that you leave Oxford to go to London. When you go there, I mean, imagine C.S. Lewis going home, either on bike or perhaps on a bus. When he left work in town, and he would have thought about it being in town, he would have a sensation of going up one of the biggest hills in the city and out into the countryside. And the kilns, though today it's surrounded by other houses and a little housing estate, then had a very large garden And still to this day, it's but a short walk from an area which is like a country park called Shotover. So you climb up yet more hill and then you have these panoramic views over Oxfordshire and in his day, Berkshire. So those of you who have visited the C.S. Lewis Foundation at the house will know this. But it's that sense that, in fact, he was in a little world of his own once he was at the kilns. Now, Tolkien's house was in a very different position. When I say his house, he had several houses in Oxford. But let's talk about the main one, which is 20 Northmore Road. So yes, he's living in Oxford, but I think I should explain how the city works. It's the same part of the city that I live in, and we call it North Oxford. And it's set between two rivers, the very famous Thames, which of course up here is called the Isis, and the slower, smaller river called the Charwell. Now, psychologically, people living in this part of the city don't really feel they live in the city centre, though we are but a walk or a short cycle ride away. We are sort of on top of the main centre. And the two rivers sort of shoot out the top like antennae on an old television, you know, sort of pointing upwards. And because there are rivers who are prone to flooding, it means that actually there's a lot of river meadows around both of them. Port Meadow in the case of the Thames, made famous most recently by Philip Pullman in his Northern Lights trilogy and his new works as well. And then the Charwell, which... though less famous, is the river which was closest to Tolkien's actual house. So all he had to do, if he was going for a stroll on his own or with his family, is walk out the front door, head to the river, and immediately you're in Willowmead's And it is thought that the charwell in particular is the inspiration for the withy windle. There are lots and lots of willows who drop their leaves. And a lot of the willows have that sort of cracked bark that you can climb inside. The trunks are sort of split and hollow in the older ones. We've done actually a short video of a walk along the charwell. So you can actually follow this on the website if you have a look. And that walk would lead out into very shire-like countryside. In particular, I wonder if he often headed his feet towards the Victoria Arms in Marston, which is an example of a lovely bankside tavern on the charwell. Yeah. And over on the Thames, this is where I tend to go. Secret is out. You have the Perch pub and you also have a bit further up the Trout. And surely those are hobbit names if ever there were any hobbit names. Reminding me of the Golden Perch, which I think Pippin was desperate to get to. So I think there's a sort of point about the mental landscape of Oxford, which might be helpful for those of you thinking about where the roots of fantasy come from. Living here, there is a sense of you don't have to go far to escape fantasy. And it's part of the magic that from the front door, the road goes ever on and on, down from the door where it began, you can immediately go into some more mythic landscapes. And surely that feeds our fantasies. Putting this together reminded me of where I grew up as a child. I grew up on the other side of London near a wood, famous wood called Epping Forest, which has... its own myths and tales about it. It's where Boudicire or Boudicire, the famous resistance fighter of the ancient Britons fighting the Romans, she had a camp there and there was a place you could walk to earth banks called Boudicire's Camp. And also Dick Turpin, the highwayman. It was famous for highwaymen living there. So there were all these stories associated with the wood. And the house I lived in was on the edge of a village. And you could walk out of the village and, out of the back door of my house, through the garden, onto a golf course, and then immediately into Epping Forest. As a child, I used to sit there looking out the window to the wood at the top of the hill, and that fed my desire to be a writer. In fact, I wrote stories about that wood and about the layers of history within the wood. That was where I started as a writer. And I'm sure these landscapes had the same importance to Lewis and Tolkien, as well as the places they'd seen in their younger years, of course. Here's a new myth which I'd like to sort of put into the general circulation about Lewis and Tolkien, and it's based on fact, you'll be pleased to hear. It's about Oxford and the military training both of them did for the First World War because they were of that generation where they came up to Oxford for a brief period before going into the armed forces to fight in that war over in France. Now, Lewis did his military training, and what little officers were given at that time, in Oxford, moving from his home college, which was University College, UNIV, to Keeble College, which had been taken over by the military for that purpose. But what perhaps is less recognised when you read the biographies, they just seem to skim over this, is at the time, just to the west of Oxford, there was part of the Cumbna Hills had been given over for trench warfare. The area is called Whigham Woods. There's a beautiful village called Whigham, very close, just on the other side of the Thames to Port Meadow. It's now known as a university research station. You can't actually walk into the woods without applying for a permit, which has a rather nice or closed wood feel to it. But in that wood, which was requisitioned or offered up to the military, they built a big area of trenches. Now, I came across this mention when I went walking in there during lockdown. Yeah. And knowing that C.S. Lewis had trained here, I sort of assumed that maybe he went there. And it wasn't until I was putting, you know, facts together that I actually came across a reference to it in his letters. You can follow the sequence of letters if you've got a collection of his letters. It starts in June 1917 when he's writing to his father. So OTC is the officer training corps. He says the OTC has just got more interesting. We spend a good deal of our time in, quotation marks, the trenches, a complete model system with dugouts, shell holes and graves. The last touch of realistic scenery seems rather superfluous. So it's not named there, but later on, when he's writing again in September, he gives a bit more detail. And using a wry tone, he says, the next amusement on our programme is a three-day bivouac up in Whiteham Hills. As it has rained all the time for two or three days, our model trenches up there will provide a very unnecessarily good imitation of Flanders mud. You know how I always disapproved of realism in art. And then the next letter on the 24th of September goes on to say, "'The sleeping out on Cumner Hills—'that's Whiten—' "'There were only two nights of it, "'illustrated some old theories of anticipation, etc. "'But I needn't go through it. "'In point of fact, sleeping out of doors proved delightful. "'You have a waterproof ground sheet, two blankets, "'and you'll have a sack for a pillow. "'There was plenty of bracken to make a soft bed, "'and I slept excellently.' You wake up in a flash without any drowsiness, feeling wonderfully fresh. Both nights were fine, but of course it would be horrible in the wet. Now, both writers, Tolkien and Lewis, have characters who spend time sleeping outdoors under the stars. But in the case of Lewis, it reminded me a lot of particularly Prince Caspian, when the children get back to Narnia under different circumstances. And there are a number of skirmishes in the wood. And the children are in a more exposed combat situation than in The Lion and the Witch and Wardrobe, where they go from the beaver's house to Aslan's camp. It's all much safer. But in Prince Caspian, they're out having to bivouac in the woods. Perhaps he's drawing, you know, the way people come up with ideas as a fantasy writer isn't just one source, but I like to think that maybe White and Woods and his experience of sleeping out under the stars does in some way feed into the Narnia stories. I mentioned that Tolkien also had some training before he went off to France. He was a bit ahead of Lewis in that he went into the war a year or so earlier. And he mentions another Oxford Open Space that was used for training. That is the university parks. Keeble lies opposite the university parks. And Tolkien mentions practicing drill there. Now, this place is a beautiful area of open ground, lots of playing fields. So if you go there today, you'll see people playing cricket. There's football games of all sorts. They had an American football pitch laid out earlier, a month or so ago. It's also a place very popular with dog walkers, which I can attest to because I go there most days. And oddly, also where I've come across Quidditch players. That is rare, but it's nice to see that fantasy also leaks into university parks where some of the student groups have a go at playing a kind of earthbound version of Quidditch. It is a thing, apparently. Good luck to everybody. So I'd like to sort of throw into the image of living and working in Oxford, the younger Lewis and Tolkien and the importance of this place as a time of training and getting ready to go out to real theatres of war. Right, the next place I want to go on my lesser known facts about The Inklings, particularly Tolkien in this case, is about ferries. Now, all of us who have seen the film of Lord of the Rings, Fellowship of the Ring, will remember the scene at the Bucklebury ferry where Merry is punting over and Frodo takes a running jump to join the ferry. That is a bit less dramatically done in the actual book, but... What about ferries? Now, these days in Oxford, there is no ferry across the river because we have road bridges and foot bridges. But looking at an old OS map, which we picked up in a local charity shop, which was before the big road building boom of the sort of 60s and 70s in this area. it still shows the presence of several little ferries that you could have got on. It's funny to think of that now, because it is an unusual thing these days in the UK to get on a ferry. But in Tolkien's day, you could, for example, walk through university parks, and in order to get over to the other side, in the halfway along the park, there was a little ferry that you could get on. We're talking about a stretch of water, which is no more than, oh... 10 metres across or something. It's a very short stretch, but enough and deep enough for a ferry to be necessary. But the one that I think is probably more like the Bucklebury Ferry is the one near the pub I mentioned, the Victoria Arms. If you went out to the fields just beyond Tolkien's house... and wanted to cross the Charwell to get to the pub, the way to do it was to get on the ferry. Near where I live, on the canal in Oxford, there was one near town, a ferry across the river in Jericho. So the whole place was full of these little tiny boats that would take locals across because building a bridge is expensive. A ferry comes with a shilling fare or a couple of pence or whatever it was, depending on the route. So there we go. I wanted to sort of root the fact that the Bucklebury Ferry might well have had a very Oxford inspiration at the heart of it. Now, two more things for this podcast, and I'll keep on trying to dig up lesser known facts, but these are two more things for this particular episode. One is Tolkien, the forgotten sportsman. Now, when you think of Tolkien, I bet most of you have in mind a picture of him as an elderly man, perhaps sitting under a tree, smoking a pipe or in a library, that kind of or in his study. That's the archetypal image we have of Tolkien. But of course, he wrote his novels when he was a much younger man. He certainly wrote The Hobbit in the 30s when he had a young family. So we have to sort of shift our frame and start thinking about him in his prime, really. And he was a very active person. Now, this thought to come up with this was prompted by, I keep saying this, so forgive me if you've heard me say this already, is prompted by the story of the squash playing in my own family. My husband's grandfather, when he was an academic in Leeds, was Tolkien's squash partner. I had never thought that Tolkien played squash, but there you go. Proof positive in my own family. up in Leeds. But when you actually look through the biographies, you come across Tolkien as a keen rugby player. Now, rugby is a game less known in the States, but certainly played in many countries around the world. It's a very rough game with lots of scrums and a ball shaped a similar way to the American football. So it is a high impact game. He was very keen on rugby at his oratory school in Birmingham. And he was actually captain of rugby at the next school, King Edwards. Considering that he wasn't the biggest, heftiest guy ever to live, you know, he was a slim, statured man, probably suggested he was in one of the running roles in that where you have to sort of dodge past the big defending guys. Anyway, very impressive that he was a rugby player. Also, there are references to the family going punting and playing tennis. When he took over 20 Northmore Road, there was actually a decrepit tennis court there. I think he got rid of it because he preferred gardening, but he certainly did play tennis. And there's also references to him rowing. Again, another water-bound sport. So he was definitely more of a merry brandy-buck than a Sam Gamgee when it came to being on the water. It's also known from his biography that he was a terrible driver, but a very successful walker. Active, outdoor. So his idea of going on holiday when he was again, a traditional bucket and spade bonding with family, would be to set off with someone like C.S. Lewis and then Barfield and go for long walks. So the outdoorsy life of the Hobbits fits really well with that era Tolkien. So he knew what it was like to walk for that length of time, to look for the next pub, to sleep under the stars and have the blisters on the feet. All of those things are his lived experience in the English countryside. And of course, when he was younger, he also had a walking holiday in the Alps, which no doubt... inspired the Misty Mountains and the bigger mountains that he mentions in his work. And if you want to find a good source on that, the John Garth book recently published on the landscapes of Middle Earth is absolutely brilliant covering all these areas. He certainly picks up on the walking, though I can't remember if he actually picks up on the sport. But there we are. I want to put that back into our image of Tolkien, that he actually was an outdoors person. And the place a keen gardener and developed the garden of all his houses. It was a large garden in the case of 20 Northmore Road, but he loved vegetable growing and tending plots. So there we've got a bit of Sam Gamgee and Gaffer Gamgee, haven't we? His children also remember the chickens they kept during the war. This might actually have been more of an Edith Tolkien interest because she had an aviary where she had birds and then under wartime conditions that became keeping chickens. But anyway, so think of the family not being stuck in a study but going out, going for walks, going for drives, going to the seaside, experiencing the outdoors. And you can understand a bit more about the life of the hobbits as a result. And the final place I want to go is about Tolkien and trees. This also obviously applies to Lewis because trees are very magical things in his own work with them literally coming alive in the form of dryads. England lost many of its woodlands by the time Tolkien is writing and he laments the passing of some of the old landscapes. Hearteningly, that has been reversed a bit now. So there are groups reforesting and tending woodlands better now than there was in the mid 20th century. But Tolkien was surrounded by fantastic trees in Oxford in more of a parkland managed setting. And there are three places which you can find splendid trees that would have been very close to where Tolkien would walk. I'm going to mention the university parks again. This has a series of wonderful trees. They're specimen trees planted on purpose in order to see how they grow in this landscape. They're labelled so you can look at where they've come from. There are some wonderful gnarly trees, oaks and beeches, as well as more unusual specimen. Tolkien actually has a special bench on on the river in university parks. They tried to plant some trees in his honour and unfortunately I don't think they lasted. They were supposed to be two trees like the trees that used to light the world. But unfortunately I think they were a victim to a tree disease. But still there are lots of wonderful trees in that park that he would have walked past and I like to go past them and touch the park thinking I'm sure Tolkien would have done this. There's one particular beech tree, for example, that must have been there many years before he was walking past on his stroll into town. And then there's the Botanical Gardens, which is over near Magdalen, near CS Lewis's college, where there was a famous tree there that was called Tolkien's favourite tree. That too has gone the way of many trees. This is the thing with trees, they don't last forever, unlike Ents, who seem to manage to last almost forever. But still, it's a very beautiful place with lots of exciting different trees for him to look at and imagine them coming alive. And inside Merton College, there's a tree that they particularly pick out in the grounds near his office that he would have looked out on. Another inspirational tree. So Oxford is a place of trees actually in the centre. You don't have to leave the city to find them. They're part of the built landscape. Yeah. And one of the things that I've discovered recently is there's some really wild patches that I expect he would have known about, but lots of local people don't. So Merton College owns a patch of land that's really tucked away called Music Meadow. And it's got this incredible little woodland in it, full of birdsong and bluebells. And it's a real surprise because from Northmore Road. It's further into town. You would think that somewhere like that, this sort of little woodland, would have been outside the city. But no, it's right in the heart, tucked away behind the colleges and protected by the fact that the colleges aren't developing that land. So he could have found the kind of inspirational woods of Lothlorien and the Old Forest and Mirkwood, Trees that might have fitted in his fantasy landscape right in the heart of the city, because we're very blessed by having a wonderful legacy, thanks to those people who took the trouble to plant the trees for us. Right. So I suppose that leads on to the segment which I do every podcast, which is where in the fantasy world would you go? The best place under a certain heading in any fantasy universe that you can think of. And as I was talking about trees, I suppose I should say today is where is the best forest to go? Now, it's tempting here just to say the obvious place, but I thought before I go there, I'd want to mention some places that you may not yet have read, but I love as forests. And one of them is in a series by the Australian writer Maria V. Schneider in her Chronicles of Ixia. And it starts with Poison Study. Poison Study. These are really exciting fantasy series with really strong female leads. Anyway, Elena, the main character in the second book in the series, Magic Study, ends up taking refuge back home. And she finds that her family come from a civilization built in the treetops. So it's a very exciting book to sort of imagine what it would be like to live up in the trees and how that would affect what they wear and how they move and what they think is ordinary. So I'm going to offer, as a great forest to live in, is Yelena's family home. And another forest in a series that you may not have come across yet, but I absolutely love, is a series by T.A. White called The Broken Lands Trilogy. In particular, the forest that you see in Mist's Edge. Shia, the main character here, is living with a sort of warlord community and they come across this... They travel from place to place with their encampment. They come across this... community who live up in massive, massive trees. And the actual symbol of the tree in that book is really strong because it clearly roots the world. I don't want to go too much into it, but it sort of feels a bit like it's drawing on Isdragil, the sort of Viking tree. It's a wonderful series, very exciting. Another one that you might want to put on your reading list if you haven't yet the best forest has to be Lothlorien. Certainly since I was a child and read about Lothlorien and just desperately desired to go there, it just seems so ineffably beautiful. I mean, it'd be great to walk around Fangorn Forest, but I never got the impression it was as comfortable a place to be, unless you're staying at Treebeard's house, of course. So though that is a great forest, I think that of all the forests in all the fantasy worlds, the one I would go to is Lothlorien. Though actually, having said that, what about the woods between the worlds in Narnia? Ah, yes, because you can get into other worlds from there. Yeah. No, I think I'll stick with Lothlorien because we're between the worlds you don't really want to stay in, do you? It's a place you go through. Okay, I am going to say Lothlorien. If you have an idea for your favourite forest or one that you've met in another fantasy series and want to sort of let other people know about, do let us know. And I will certainly have a read because I love forest as a location for adventure. Right, that's all for this episode of Myth Makers. And I hope I may have mentioned something here that you didn't know before about Tolkien, or for that matter, C.S. Lewis. In the next episodes, we're going to be looking at some of the most recent big series, fantasy series, that have made it into TV and film. So we'll be looking at things like uh star wars and the marvel universe just to see where fantasy has reached in terms of the big streaming services and hollywood there of course are these days too many to for one person to actually manage to watch all of them but we'll touch on some of the most famous so that's all from myth makers for this episode don't forget to like and subscribe We are new on the podcasting scene, so if you have suggestions for topics you'd like us to cover, or for guests, don't forget to send them in because we'll try and make that happen. That's all for today. Goodbye. Thanks for listening to MythMakers Podcast. Brought to you by the Oxford Centre for Fantasy. Visit OxfordCentreForFantasy.org to join in the fun. Find out about our online courses, In Person Stays in Oxford, plus visit our shop for great gifts. Tell a friend and subscribe wherever you find your favourite podcasts worldwide.