Tolkien Sights in Oxford

On my travels through England, I also wanted to walk in the footsteps of another of Oxford’s great: J.R.R. Tolkien

Tolkien is of course the author of The Hobbit (1937) & The Lord of the Rings (1954-1955). While I am admittedly not 100% versed in all things “hobbit”, I do appreciate the imagination of a storyteller.  I wanted to see the places and things that inspired this great to create a new world called Middle Earth with goblins, hobbits, elves, orcs and other creatures & to see how Tolkien created his myths of tales of the ordinary man, made to grow beyond his previous limited horizons.

JRR Tolkien (1892-1973) grew up in South Africa and Birmingham, England. After graduating from Oxford, Tolkien fought in World War I. Upon the end of the war, Tolkien returned to Oxford and first worked at the New English Dictionary (The “Oxford English Dictionary”). He remained in Oxford and went on to become  a major scholar of the English language, specializing in Old and Middle English and twice Professor of Anglo-Saxon (Old English) at the University of Oxford.

As the story goes… one day he was marking examination papers and discovered that one candidate had left one page of an answer book blank. On this page he wrote “In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit”.  And the tale of The Hobbit commenced as he wove a tale about this imaginary world.

Here is my notes of the sites to see in Oxford where you can see and feel Tolkien’s vision: