The Enchanted Book Club Tours Oxford: In the Footsteps of the Masters of Fantasy

I knew we’d arrived in Oxford when I saw The Eagle and the Child pub out the bus window. Last time I’d been here, I had dinner there and spent the evening pretending to be one of the Inklings. This time, however, the pub was closed and I felt more like Tolkien’s character Bilbo Baggins at the moment anyway. Somewhat like Bilbo, I’d set off on adventure with 14 new traveling companions I’d only just met two days prior. Now we were all excitedly tumbling off a bus to spend the day walking in the footsteps of authors Tolkien, Lewis, and Carrol, all giants of the Fantasy genre. We were met by a tall, skinny, older gentleman, though with no wizard hat in sight. But like Gandalf, he would be our guide, at least for today.

I was traveling with several members of The Enchanted Book Club and at our previous destination, a few of them had become choked up with emotion just being outside Jane Austen’s house. Here in Oxford, I understood how they’d felt. When I think of The Hobbit, I think of my Dad reading to me at bedtime before I was able to read chapter books to myself, so Tolkien and his works hold a special place in my heart. I wasn’t sure what we would see in Oxford today, but I was happy just to be walking the streets Tolkien would have been familiar with. As our little company set off on foot behind our walking tour guide, I loved knowing that John Tolkien and his Inkling companion Clive Lewis, though better known to Tolkien as “Jack”, had walked these same sidewalks, Oxford school gown tails flying behind them.

The Bodleian Library

Speaking of student gowns, the first stop on our tour was the Bodleian Library Divinity School room. According to our guide, when schooling in Oxford first started, it would have been the clergy who were learned, and the gowns Oxford students wear today have their basis in clergy robes. Our guide continued to tell us that originally schooling would have been less books and more lectures and oral examinations, which is why our literary tour had started in a room without books.

I was only half listening, however, because something about this room felt familiar, like I’d seen it somewhere before. But in my head, it wasn’t clergy robes or student gowns that should have been in this room. It was wizard cloaks. After tuning back into our guide to learn more about the intertwining of religion and learning, things became clear when he finally pointed to a panel of photos by the door. This was the room used as the Hogwarts Infirmary in the filming of Harry Potter!

Of course we couldn’t visit Oxford without seeing at least a couple locations related to Harry Potter. Later in the tour we were able to pop our heads into a dining hall at Magdalene (pronounced “Maudlin”) College because J. K. Rowling may have based the Hogwarts Great Hall long table formations on Oxford’s dining halls. Considering we were on the trail of the greatest fantasy authors, it seems appropriate to count Rowling among them.

After the Infirmary, I mean the Divinity School room, our tour was led into Duke Humfrey’s Library, the oldest reading room in the Bodleian Old Library. This was the part of the Bodleian Library I’d been longing to see. The sight and smell of the large, old volumes lining the walls brought the giddy excitement I feel every time I step into an archive.

We learned that this was the first “book gallery” in England to stop chaining books to shelves. This was because it was the first library to apparently figure out that if you put a gate by the librarian’s desk, people couldn’t steal the books. (At the time, the books were quite large, so nobody was slipping books into their pockets.)

And we also found out why we had had to climb so many stairs to reach this library. At the time it was built, libraries were put on top floors to reach as much daylight as possible, because candles were (and frankly, still are) a hazardous way to light up a room full of paper!

Our guide, in his wonderful British accent, rattled off so many interesting facts so quickly that eventually I gave up trying to take notes and resigned myself to the idea that our Oxford tour would be like what I imagine trying to get through Tolkien’s Silmarillion is like- an overwhelming amount of details while I was just looking for a good storyline.

J. R. R. Tolkien

After the Bodleian we walked by or through what’s now a blur of churches and colleges that related to Tolkien and/or Lewis in one way or another. Oxford is actually 39 different colleges and Tolkien lived at least eight different places in Oxford. So we walked by doorways or saw windows from across perfectly manicured lawns that our guide pointed to while casually dropping that Tolkien studied, taught, or lived here and there.

C. S. Lewis

We got to sit in the University College Church of St. Mary the Virgin, the church where C. S. Lewis gave sermons, and we learned that Lewis was apparently such a great orator that people would pack into lecture halls to hear him. Our guide told us Lewis would start his lecture as he walked into a room, give the entire lecture with no notes, then finish as he walked out!

And speaking of Lewis striding around campus, while following in his footsteps we passed a lamp post that looks just like the one Lucy encounters as she begins her journey into Narnia. And near the Oxford lamp post is a doorway, the door itself is decorated by a carved face of a lion, and on either side of the door are carvings of fauns. It’s just possible that somehow these three things appeared in his manuscript as the lamppost in the wardrobe, Aslan the lion, and Mr. Tumnus the faun. It’s fun to think that Lewis may have taken in these icons while walking, mulled them over, and had them come out as the fantastical and well-known story elements we know and love today.

Tolkien & Lewis

We also got to set foot on the path which runs between a deer park and the Magdalene New Building where Lewis had rooms for use while on campus (the windows of these rooms are now marked by flower boxes which are, our guide admitted, placed to aid the tour guides in pointing out the windows). This path is where Lewis walked often with Tolkien and while out walking one day, eventually as he put it, became “a reluctant convert.” Having turned from Christianity at a young age after his mother died, it was deep discussions with Tolkien and other Oxford friends that brought Lewis slowly back around to his religion. Interestingly, if not for Tolkien, Narnia may not have turned out the way it did!

Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carroll)

Finally, Middle Earth, Narnia, and the Wizarding World were not the only fantasy worlds to come out of Oxford. Before all of them, there was Wonderland! Lewis Carroll’s Wonderland is thought to be the first children’s portal fantasy novel (meaning a child goes through a portal to a new reality), and interestingly, Wonderland has more basis in Oxford than any of the rest. Professor Charles Dodgson, or better known to us as Lewis Carroll, made friends with young Alice Liddell, who was the daughter of the Dean of Christchurch College. She lived in the palatial Dean’s house from age four to 24, and Dodgson began making up stories for her to amuse her while on outings.

As we walked by the Dean House of Christchurch College our tour guide divulged that the characters Alice met in Wonderland were based on very real people Alice Liddell knew in Oxford. For starters, the Queen of Hearts was based on Alice’s disagreeable nanny, and the Mad Hatter was the hat maker on the high street just around the corner, who unfortunately was quite mad thanks to the arsenic used in the hat-making process. So we ended our Oxford outing at what is today Alice’s Shop, where the real Alice used to come to buy sweets.

Although we’d seen so much and walked what felt to our feet like “there and back again,” our day in Oxford wasn’t over. Both Tolkien and Lewis owned off-campus houses in Oxford, so our little troup regrouped on the bus while it trundled us off to the outskirts of campus.

Tolkien’s Northmoor House

Unfortunately all we were able to see of Tolkien’s former property was part of the back of the house, which displays a blue plaque dedicated to Tolkien, peeking out above a tall fence. The house is privately owned and not a museum, so all we could do was stop for a photo opportunity in front of the house.

C. S. Lewis, The Kilns, and Trinity Church

A very short ride later, our bus pulled up in a neighborhood next to a house with a small sign which read “The Kilns.” This is the house in which C. S. Lewis lived, housed three or four evacuee girls from London during WWII, and wrote The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe and his other Narnia books. The C. S. Lewis Foundation owns the former residence, and uses it as housing for a scholars-in residence program. Thus the rooms, such as the library, kitchen, and dining room are used by the scholars living in the house, but can be seen by appointment! Our tour guide through The Kilns was a former resident who shared stories about Lewis and his family as well as what it was like living and working in the house. This ended up being the highlight of my day.

Upon arriving at the home, we were invited into what I assumed had been Lewis’ library. It was here we learned more about Lewis’ life story. Lewis hated the name Clive, so at age four after losing his beloved dog Jacksie, he requested that his family call him after the dog. As he aged, the name was shortened to Jack, and thus, Tolkien and the other Inklings knew Lewis as “Jack.” Jack lived with his brother Warner, or “Warnie,” and it was after WWI that the move to this house was necessitated by the fact that Jack had made a pact with a friend while serving in WWI that if either of them should be killed, the other would take in the surviving dependents. Thus after the war, Jack and Warnie took in the mother and sister of their departed brother in arms. And the room we were now sitting in had once been the garage where Warnie stored his motorbike. Although slightly disappointed at not actually being in Lewis’ former library, I was excited by the fact that the original sign for The Eagle and the Child pub where the Inklings used to meet, is now here in this room on the wall!

Instead of walking through the house to get to the room once used by Jack and Warnie as the library, we walked outside and around the house due to some current piping catastrophe that had temporarily blocked the way. Funny enough however, we learned that for most of his residence in this house, Jack could only proceed from his bedroom to the rest of the house by first going outside. Due to the fact that the bedroom of his former friends’ mother lay between his bedroom and the stairwell, rather than proceed through her bedroom, he locked the door between the rooms and had a staircase built on the exterior of the house so that he could exit his room without disturbing her.

Eventually the lady was moved to an old folks’ home and after changing the lock, because he’d lost the key to the door, her former bedroom became his writing room. He sat at a desk in the middle of the room, facing the window, and penned Narnia. Although the furniture in the room now isn’t his original desk, it still took my breath away to be standing there behind his desk where the light from the window warmly beamed down in the room. I was so happy to be standing just inches from where Lucy, Aslan, and Mr. Tumnus first took form from the tip of C. S. Lewis’ pen!

Although I quite enjoyed stepping through the former library, dining room, kitchen, bedroom, and writing room, I have to admit that my favorite room in the Kilns was one we couldn’t actually step inside, but only peek from the doorway. At the top of the stairs we were able to look into the attic space. It was here we were told where Lewis and his brother came up with stories of magic worlds. There was a worn, but comfortable looking chair, and at the back, a small Narnia wardrobe, placed purely for the pleasure of visitors like us.

After thanking our guide for the tour of Lewis’ and her former home, we filed back onto the bus for one more stop before we left Oxford. Just around the corner from The Kilns is Trinity Church, the church where Lewis worshiped and eventually was buried. There’s now a Narnia window next to the pew where Lewis used to sit in the church. After a brief stop inside the church to see the pew and the window, we all quietly paid our respects outside in the cemetery at the author’s graveside.

And then, like Alice or the Pevensies, we clambered back through our portal, in our case the bus door, leaving the realm of  Fantasy’s greatest behind us. Tomorrow we would wake in a new city ready for a new adventure. 

Like this post? Save it for later or share it with a friend!