Tolkien’s England

The Bodleian Library serves as the University of Oxford's chief research library. Sir Thomas Bodley established it in 1602; it ranks among Europe's oldest libraries and contains more than thirteen million printed items. Oxford academics often call it Bodley or the Bod, and materials generally stay within the reading rooms.

It holds a substantial archive of J.R.R. Tolkien's manuscripts, artwork, and papers, much deposited by the Tolkien Estate. The collection spans his fiction and academic writing and is open to scholars.

Source: Wikipedia — Bodleian Library · CC BY-SA 4.0 · text in our own words

The Eagle and Child is a public house on St Giles' in Oxford, England, also known locally as the Bird and Baby. The Ellison Institute of Technology owns it today; earlier it ran as a Nicholson's house under Mitchells & Butlers. From the seventeenth century it belonged to University College's endowment. In 2005 twenty-five other British pubs bore the same name.

The Inklings met there; J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis were among that literary circle.

Source: Wikipedia — The Eagle and Child · CC BY-SA 4.0 · text in our own words

Exeter College is a constituent college of the University of Oxford. Founded in 1314, it ranks among the university’s oldest colleges.

J.R.R. Tolkien matriculated there in 1911, first reading classics and later English language and literature, and took a first-class degree in 1915. As an undergraduate he began the early mythological writing that grew into his legendarium.

Source: Wikipedia — Exeter College, Oxford · CC BY-SA 4.0 · text in our own words

Merton College belongs to the University of Oxford in England. It began in the 1260s under Walter de Merton, who had been chancellor under Henry III and Edward I, and who framed rules for a free-standing academic house, placing its property with the Warden and Fellows as a self-ruling body.

From 1945 to 1959 Tolkien served there as Fellow and as Merton Professor of English Language and Literature.

Source: Wikipedia — Merton College, Oxford · CC BY-SA 4.0 · text in our own words

The Oxford University Museum of Natural History stands on Parks Road in Oxford and houses the university’s natural-history collections. Its lecture hall is used by several science faculties, and the building also forms the public route into the adjoining Pitt Rivers Museum.

In January 1938 Tolkien gave a children’s Christmas lecture here on dragons, illustrated with lantern slides from the museum’s holdings and with drawings of his own.

Source: Wikipedia — Oxford University Museum of Natural History · CC BY-SA 4.0 · text in our own words

Pembroke College is a college of the University of Oxford, situated on Pembroke Square. Founded in 1624 under King James I with support from merchant Thomas Tesdale’s bequest, it takes its name from William Herbert, 3rd Earl of Pembroke, then Chancellor of the University.

From 1925 to 1945 J.R.R. Tolkien held a fellowship here as Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon. While attached to the college he wrote The Hobbit and much of The Lord of the Rings.

Source: Wikipedia — Pembroke College, Oxford · CC BY-SA 4.0 · text in our own words

Wolvercote Cemetery lies in northern Oxford, within the parish of Wolvercote and the Cutteslowe area. It is a municipal burial ground that has received national recognition, winning Cemetery of the Year awards in 1999 and 2001.

J. R. R. Tolkien and his wife Edith share a grave here in the Catholic section. After Edith’s death in 1971 the name Lúthien was cut on the stone; when Tolkien was buried beside her in 1973, Beren was added beneath his own name.

Source: Wikipedia — Wolvercote Cemetery · CC BY-SA 4.0 · text in our own words

Edgbaston Waterworks is a Victorian pumping station in Edgbaston, west of Birmingham city centre. Its brick tower, designed around 1870, still forms part of the local water infrastructure.

J. R. R. Tolkien lived nearby in childhood. With Perrott's Folly, the tower is widely taken as a model for the paired towers evoked by The Two Towers.

Source: Wikipedia — Edgbaston Waterworks · CC BY-SA 4.0 · text in our own words

Moseley Bog and Joy's Wood is a local nature reserve of roughly twelve hectares in Moseley, Birmingham, England. Once known as The Dell, it belongs to the Shire Country Park with nearby Sarehole Mill.

As a boy, J.R.R. Tolkien lived close by at Sarehole and explored these woods. The wet, tangled ground is widely taken as a model for the Old Forest in The Lord of the Rings.

Source: Wikipedia — Moseley Bog · CC BY-SA 4.0 · text in our own words

The Birmingham Oratory is a Roman Catholic community of the Congregation of the Oratory of Saint Philip Neri, based in Edgbaston, Birmingham. Established in 1849 by John Henry Newman, it was the first English house of that congregation.

After the death of J.R.R. Tolkien’s mother, Father Francis Xavier Morgan of the Oratory became legal guardian of Tolkien and his brother Hilary. Tolkien attended Mass there for several years and later named his eldest son partly in Morgan’s honour.

Source: Wikipedia — Birmingham Oratory · CC BY-SA 4.0 · text in our own words

Perrott's Folly is a Grade II* listed stone tower roughly twenty-nine metres high, standing in Edgbaston, Birmingham. Dating from 1758, it has long been called the Monument or the Observatory.

Tolkien lived near the site as a boy. Together with the neighbouring Edgbaston Waterworks tower, it is widely taken as a possible childhood model for the paired fortresses of The Two Towers.

Source: Wikipedia — Perrott's Folly · CC BY-SA 4.0 · text in our own words

Sarehole Mill, a Grade II listed watermill on Birmingham’s River Cole at Hall Green, functions today as a museum managed by Birmingham Museums Trust. Among the city’s mills, only this site and New Hall Mill at Walmley still run under water power.

The surrounding district, once named Sarehole, is closely tied to J. R. R. Tolkien, who spent part of his boyhood nearby; readers often treat the mill and its countryside as formative models for the rural world of his legendarium.

Source: Wikipedia — Sarehole Mill · CC BY-SA 4.0 · text in our own words

Albert is a town in the Somme department of northern France, between Amiens and Bapaume. It was a chief British rear base in the 1916 Somme offensive and suffered heavy wartime damage.

In 1916 J.R.R. Tolkien served nearby as a signals officer with the Lancashire Fusiliers. Albert lay on the routes units used toward the front. He later wrote that the Dead Marshes owed something to northern France after the Somme; the sector’s ruin is widely read as shaping images of desolation in his fiction.

Source: Wikipedia — Albert, Somme · CC BY-SA 4.0 · text in our own words

The Thiepval Memorial stands near Thiepval in Picardy, France. Its architect was Sir Edwin Lutyens; it records over 72,000 British and South African servicemen who fell in Somme operations from 1915 to 1918 and have no known burial place.

In 1916 J.R.R. Tolkien served as a signalling officer with the Lancashire Fusiliers on the Somme, including action around Thiepval Wood and Thiepval Ridge. The name of his friend Ralph Payton, missing in the war, is among those carved on the monument.

Source: Wikipedia — Thiepval Memorial · CC BY-SA 4.0 · text in our own words

Bournemouth is a seaside town and civil parish on England’s south coast, in Dorset within the Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole authority. Its built-up area held some 196,000 residents at the 2021 census, the largest town in the county.

J.R.R. Tolkien and his wife Edith long favoured the resort for holidays and later settled nearby in retirement. After Edith’s death he returned to Oxford, but died at Bournemouth on 2 September 1973 while visiting friends.

Source: Wikipedia — Bournemouth · CC BY-SA 4.0 · text in our own words