The difficulty was to follow the thread of his conversation’ (George Allen and Unwin: A Remembrancer (1999), pp. 87–8). Austin Farrer, fellow and chaplain of Trinity College 1935–60, and his wife *Katharine were friends of the Tolkien family.
University Museum. Housed in a Gothic Revival building designed by Benjamin Woodward under the influence of John Ruskin and constructed in Parks Road in 1855–60, the Museum preserves the University’s collections of zoological, entomological, mineralogical, and geological specimens. There, on 1 January 1938, Tolkien gave a lecture on dragons, one of a series of Christmas lectures for children sponsored by the Museum.
University Parks. An extensive area to the north of central Oxford, bounded to the east by the River Cherwell. Tolkien drilled in the Parks as an undergraduate member of the Officer Training Corps. In 1992 two trees were planted in the Parks to mark the centenary of his birth, a silver-leaved maple and a false acacia, chosen to represent Telperion and Laurelin, the Two Trees of Valinor in Tolkien’s mythology.
The White Horse. A public house at 52 Broad Street, next to Blackwell’s Bookshop. A pub has stood on this site since at least 1591, and has been called ‘White Horse’ since at least 1750. Although the interior is old, the façade was rebuilt in 1951. Tolkien met C.S. Lewis, his brother Warren, and Charles Williams at the White Horse at least twice in 1944.
Wolvercote Cemetery. Originally a village to the north-west of Oxford, Wolvercote was absorbed into the expanding city in 1929. Here Tolkien and his wife Edith are buried, in the area reserved for Roman Catholics on the western side of the Corporation cemetery. Their grave is marked by a grey granite stone inscribed, at Tolkien’s instruction, ‘Edith Mary Tolkien, Lúthien, 1889–1971’ and ‘John Ronald Reuel Tolkien, Beren, 1892–1973’, after characters in his mythology. Their son John is buried nearby. Following his return to Oxford, Tolkien visited Edith’s grave every Sunday after attending Mass in Headington.
Worcester College. Worcester College was established by royal charter in 1714 and built slowly from 1720 onward, on the site and incorporating parts of the former Gloucester College for Benedictine monks (founded 1283) and its successor, Gloucester Hall. Parts of the medieval buildings survive. On 14 February 1938 Tolkien read *Farmer Giles of Ham to members of the Lovelace Society, an essay club at Worcester College. *C.H. Wilkinson, Dean of Worcester College, later urged Tolkien to publish the story, and was made its dedicatee.
PLACES NEAR OXFORD
The county of Oxfordshire in central southern England is bounded by Buckinghamshire, *Berkshire, Gloucestershire, Warwickshire, and North-amptonshire. After their move to Oxford in 1926 Tolkien, his wife Edith, and their children made many excursions into the surrounding countryside, especially after Tolkien purchased a car in 1932: Humphrey Carpenter mentions ‘the drives on autumn afternoons to the villages east of Oxford, to Worminghall or Brill or Charlton-on-Otmoor, or west into Berkshire and up White Horse Hill to see the ancient long-barrow known as Wayland’s Smithy’ (Biography, p. 160).
Worminghall is a village in Buckinghamshire a few miles east of Oxford. John and Priscilla Tolkien recalled the excitement one year when they found a rare bee orchid in the countryside near Worminghall. The village also figures in Farmer Giles of Ham. Brill, a hilltop village about twelve miles north-east of Oxford, is appropriately, indeed doubly named: Brill is derived from Welsh bree (‘hill’) and English hill; see T.A. Shippey, The Road to Middle-earth (2nd edn. 1992), p. 99, and compare Bree in The Lord of the Rings. A mile or so further east is Wotton Underwood, one of several Wottons or Woottons (from Old English ‘homestead’ or ‘village in or by a wood’) in Oxfordshire, whose name is echoed in the setting of Smith of Wootton Major. Charlton-on-Otmoor is a village about eight miles north-east of Oxford, with a fine Gothic church.
The Tolkien family also enjoyed punting on the Cherwell, which was not far from their home in Northmoor Road, ‘down past the Parks to Magdalen Bridge, or better still … up-river towards Water Eaton and Islip [see below] where a picnic tea could be spread on a bank’ (Humphrey Carpenter, Biography, p. 160). The river winds along the eastern boundary of the University Parks and through the grounds of Magdalen College until it joins the Isis (Thames) to the south of Christ Church Meadow. The family also went on ‘walks across the fields to Wood Eaton [north of Oxford] to look for butterflies … walks when their father seemed to have a boundless store of knowledge about trees and plants’ (Biography, p. 160).
John and Priscilla Tolkien note in The Tolkien Family Album that ‘celebratory visits were sometimes made to take tea at country inns, like The Roof Tree at Woodstock (now long since gone), The White Hart at Dorchester (now a very grand restaurant) and The George at Sandford-on-Thames’ (p. 63). Woodstock is about eight miles north-west of Oxford. Its royal manor built by Henry I no longer exists, but the king’s deer park is part of the grounds of Blenheim Palace. *Chaucer’s House in Woodstock is said to have belonged to the poet’s son. Tolkien stayed at The Bear in Woodstock in April 1946 for about ten days with his son Christopher while Edith was away. On 2 April Warren Lewis and *R.E. Havard joined them there for lunch, and on 11 April there was an Inklings dinner and meeting at The Bear.
Dorchester is about ten miles south of Oxford, once a Roman station and an important Anglo-Saxon town, at times the cathedral city of Wessex or Mercia. The Augustinians established a house here in 1140, and their fine church, with parts from the twelfth to the fourteenth centuries, survives. Sandford-on-Thames is just beyond the southern edge of Oxford, along the towpath of the river below Iffley. In the second half of October 1911, while an undergraduate, Tolkien wrote the poem From Iffley (*From the Many-Willow’d Margin of the Immemorial Thames), describing Oxford seen from the river at that village.
Before the Second World War Tolkien also often visited Deddington, about sixteen miles north of Oxford. On 14 December 1956 he made a speech at the dedication of the new town library, and was entertained to tea by the Domestic Science Department in the local secondary school.
Several places in Oxfordshire are mentioned or alluded to in Farmer Giles of Ham and its projected sequel, including Islip, Oakley, Otmoor, the Rollright Stones (the Standing Stones), Thame, and Worminghall. Islip is a village seven miles north of Oxford, the birthplace of Edward the Confessor. Oakley is a small village about five miles north-east of Oxford, originally called Quercetum; a church was first recorded in Oakley in 1142. In Farmer Giles of Ham the parson of Oakley is eaten by the dragon Chrysophylax. Otmoor is a wild moorland east of the city, one of the boundaries of Giles’ ‘Little Kingdom’. It was once a great marshy area, and is so described by Tolkien in notes for the sequel to Farmer Giles.
The Rollright Stones are a prehistoric monument about twenty-four miles north-east of Oxford on the Warwickshire border, near the village of Little Rollright: they consist of a small stone circle about 100 feet in diameter, with a large isolated ‘King’s Stone’ probably dating from the early Bronze Age, about 1500 BC. A group of five additional large stones about a quarter of a mile distant, known as ‘The Whispering Knights’, is probably the remains of a late Stone Age long barrow built c. 2000 BC. Thame is an old market town thirteen miles east of Oxford, named for the River Thame, which flows into the Thames. Despite its spelling, Thame is pronounced ‘Tame’. In Farmer Giles of Ham Tolkien pretends that the name derives from a conflation of its ‘original’ name Ham and Giles’ titles ‘Lord of Ham’ and ‘Lord of the Tame Worm’. Worminghall has been mentioned already; its name, pronounced ‘wunnle’, figures in Farmer Giles of Ham as that of the hall built by the twelve Draconarii or Wormwardens on the spot where Giles
