In May I hopped on a plane for a literary trip to England. I shadowed the footsteps of some great authors like C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, Jane Austen, the Bronte sisters, Charles Dickens, and … Beatrix Potter!
I even found myself accidentally learning about another author, Kenneth Grahame, who lived in Oxford and may or may not have been inspired by little rowboats in the river there. He’s the fellow who wrote Wind in the Willows.
So, who is the hardest to come alongside, of them all? I was able to learn all about most of these authors through museums, usually their former homes. In the case of Austen, the whole central town of Bath is like an Austen museum. I could see the cityscape where she lived and her characters moved around, and some building interiors that matched her soirees.
But the one author I could hardly get a handle on was my long-time favorite since I was thirteen years old. Guess who. Yes. Tolkien.
The Oxford pub where he and C.S. Lewis met with writer friends regularly, The Eagle and Child, has been closed for renovation for five years. Unlike Lewis’s, Tolkien’s house is in private hands. Unlike Lewis’s, Tolkien’s Oxford colleges were not open to the public.
What in Tolkien’s environment tweaked his imagination? I was asking myself that question for all of these writers. For Tolkien, my Oxford guide could only point to a chapel spire in the college where Tolkien lived as a student. It had dragon gargoyles.
Then, days later, my travel companion and I were following her desire to see standing stones. We found ourselves at the stone circle at Avebury, 40 miles from Oxford. There, the guide casually said there were “Tolkien’s talking trees” over that way.
It is widely believed that Tolkien found inspiration for the ents in these four beech trees, next to the stone circle. I personally never saw anything quite like the root pattern, see above.
I agree, these trees move the imagination. Big time. What do you think?
