and a sitting-room, in his first year (1911–12) at no. 7 on the no. 8 staircase, and afterward moved to no. 9 on the no. 7 staircase. He paid rent for these rooms as well as a fee for the hire of furniture. ‘Swiss Cottage’ seems to have been so named because it had a gable and exposed timber frame reminiscent of Swiss architecture. Its construction reused elements of the Prideaux Buildings, built in 1620 and demolished in 1856. A photograph of these buildings is reproduced on p. 38, and one of the ‘Swiss Cottage’ on p. 40, in Frances Cairncross, ed., Exeter College: The First 700 Years (2013); the latter is also reproduced in John Garth, Tolkien at Exeter College (2014), p. 20. ‘Swiss Cottage’ was later replaced by the building today occupied by the specialist art bookshop operated by Blackwell’s.
During the academic year 1914–15 Tolkien shared rooms at 59 St John Street with his friend *Colin Cullis. St John Street connects Wellington Square with Beaumont Street, west of and parallel to St Giles’. Tolkien found living there ‘a delicious joy compared with the primitive life of college’ (quoted in Biography, p. 72). It was at this address that he wrote, at least, the poems You & Me and the Cottage of Lost Play (*The Little House of Lost Play: Mar Vanwa Tyaliéva) and *Goblin Feet.
In late 1918, Tolkien having accepted an offer to join the staff of the New English Dictionary (*Oxford English Dictionary), he and his wife *Edith, their son *John, and Edith’s cousin *Jennie Grove moved into rooms at 50 St John Street let by a Miss Mahon. From there it was only a short walk to the Old Ashmolean (see below) in Broad Street, where the Oxford English Dictionary editorial offices were located.
In late summer 1919, his income at last sufficient to rent a small house, Tolkien moved with his family to 1 Alfred Street (Pusey Street). Alfred Street connects St John Street and St Giles’; it was renamed Pusey Street in 1925. A photograph of 1 Alfred Street at that time is reproduced in The Tolkien Family Album, p. 43. John Tolkien recalled the boyhood sight of elephants in the St Giles’ Fair led down Alfred Street for morning exercise: as they passed the Tolkiens’ dining-room window ‘they blocked out the light’ (The Tolkien Family Album, p. 43). In early 1921 the family moved to *Leeds, Tolkien having taken up the Readership in English Language at the University in October 1920.
Although Tolkien became Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford as of Michaelmas Term 1925, it was not until 7 January 1926 that he and his family moved into their next Oxford home. This was at 22 Northmoor Road in North Oxford, ‘L-shaped and of pale brick, with one wing running towards the road’ (Humphrey Carpenter, Biography, p. 113). Photographs taken in its garden are reproduced in The Tolkien Family Album, pp. 50–2. A small sketch by Tolkien of the front of 22 Northmoor Road is reproduced in Artist and Illustrator, fig. 77.
North Oxford is a residential suburb situated on land once owned largely by St John’s College, Oxford, extending (in one definition) from St Giles’ Church in the south to near Summertown in the north, and divided in the centre by the Woodstock and Banbury Roads. The College began to develop the property, meadows or pasture land beyond the built-up part of Oxford, in the middle of the nineteenth century. Northmoor Road, to the east of the Banbury Road, was built in the area known as the Bardwell Estate, the last substantial section of North Oxford to be developed by St John’s College, beginning in the 1890s, and a section reserved for the best class of houses. According to Tanis Hinchcliffe in North Oxford (1992),
by 1915 when the North Oxford estate was nearly complete, the suburb had been building for fifty years and the area had absorbed the middle-class suburban ethos. The sequestered character of the suburban village had combined with the necessary conformity of the inner suburb, to produce that peculiar character which displayed itself in retreat behind walls and hedges and a jealous concern for accepted norms, whether laid down by the landlord’s covenants or by local custom. [p. 87]
No. 1 Northmoor Road was first leased by the College in 1899. The first lease of no. 22, with Tolkien the original lessee, was recorded in 1925. No. 22 was designed by a local architect, Christopher Wright, who was also responsible for five other houses in the upper numbers in the road.
Edith Tolkien always thought no. 22 too small for their growing family, and with the arrival of a daughter, *Priscilla, in 1929 a larger house became a necessity. Fortunately in that year a neighbouring house became available, and on 14 January 1930 the Tolkiens moved to 20 Northmoor Road. ‘This second house was broad and grey, more imposing than its neighbour, with small leaded windows and a high slate roof’ (Biography, pp. 113–14). It had been built for Oxford bookseller and publisher *Basil Blackwell in 1924 by a local architect, Frederick E. Openshaw. Its rooms were not large, but there were many of them. The most exciting room in the house, as far as the Tolkien children were concerned, was their father’s study:
The walls were lined with books from floor to ceiling, and it contained a great black lead stove, the source of considerable drama every day …. The study was very much the centre of Ronald’s home life and the centre of his study was his desk. Over the years the top of his desk continued to show familiar landscapes: his dark brown wooden tobacco jar, a Toby jug containing pipes, and a large bowl into which the ash from his pipe was regularly knocked out,
as well as inks, sealing wax, coloured pencils, and tubes of paint (The Tolkien Family Album, pp. 55–6). In Humphrey Carpenter’s words, Tolkien’s study contained ‘a tunnel of books formed by a double row of bookcases, and it is not until the visitor emerges from this that the rest of the room becomes visible. There are windows on two sides, so that the room looks southwards towards a neighbouring garden and west towards the road. Tolkien’s desk is in the south-facing window’ (Biography, p. 116). Because he snored and kept late hours, Tolkien slept apart from his wife, in a bathroom-cum-dressing-room which looked east over the garden.
John and Priscilla Tolkien wrote that no. 20
was as much loved for its garden as for the house. John and Ronald worked at landscaping and redesigning the garden over many years, turning the rather decrepit tennis court at the top into a vegetable garden: an important asset during the war years that were to follow. Over the years we lived there the trees planted by the Blackwells grew almost to forest height. In a side garden, Edith had an aviary, in which budgerigars, canaries and other exotic birds lived during the summer months, being taken indoors for the winter. In war-time, the aviary was turned into a hen-house …. [The Tolkien Family Album, p. 55]
A photograph of the hens at 20 Northmoor Road is reproduced in The Tolkien Family Album, p. 72. Although the house has no architectural significance, in 2004 it was given protected status as a Grade II listed building, on the basis of Tolkien’s importance as an author.
In 1933 Tolkien and his son John built a trellis in front of 20 Northmoor Road to at least partly screen their garden from the view of passers-by. In spring 1940 Tolkien drew a picture of the garden, with daffodils and a flowering Victoria Plum tree (Artist and Illustrator, fig. 3).
On 14 March 1947 the Tolkiens moved to a small house at 3 Manor Road owned by Merton College, of which Tolkien became a fellow in 1945. By this time, with only Priscilla among the children still living with her parents, 20 Northmoor Road had become too large and too costly to maintain. But in Manor Road Tolkien and Edith ‘found both house and garden cramped and claustrophobic after the spaciousness’ they had previously enjoyed (The Tolkien Family Album, p. 74). Tolkien described their Manor Road home in a letter to Sir Stanley Unwin as ‘a minute house near the centre of this town’ (5 May 1947, Tolkien–George Allen & Unwin archive, HarperCollins). Manor Road runs east from St Cross Road towards the Cherwell, past the English Faculty Library and the Law Library. For lack of space Tolkien no longer had a proper study: he later remarked to his Aunt *Jane Neave that he had typed out the whole of *The Lord of the Rings twice, ‘mostly on my bed in the attic of the tiny terrace-house
