The Dreaming Spires of Oxford

Well! I’m still surprised that our time in England is rapidly drawing to a close – though I’m more and more worried each day as the time until my thesis, of which I haven’t written a single word yet, is due. However, with our dwindling time and dwindling funds, Ashley and I decided that we just had to get one last long weekend out of the way before we hunkered down for the remaining five weeks of thesis madness.

As usual, Ashley is the mistress of planning great trips quickly and thoroughly. She booked all of our travel – not an easy or cheap thing to do in England; home of a pretty sad state of public transportation affairs - our lodgings, and researched many of the things we wanted to be sure to see while spending two days in Oxford and two days in Bath. Ashley has written a lovely little travelogue of our time in the lovely city of Bath, so I’ll cover our first few days in the historic and enchanting city of Oxford.

As with any city of its particular age, Oxford has a wealth of history and information and a truly and impressively deep sense of character that comes along with it. In addition, of course, is the reputation that has developed in our everyday, mundane, popular culture sort of way that helps colour our impressions of places like Oxford and Cambridge.

Known for its University primarily, Oxford (a Saxon name stemming from the literal ford in the rivers useful for oxen attempting to cross) has a long and storied history that I’ve long found alluring. Even the University itself somehow tugs on your heart as some sort of pure, unadulterated form of truly higher education in a sense that oftentimes seems to have been lost in university systems today. Something more akin to Hogwarts School today than say, modern American and, to a lesser extent, British university systems. Founded in 1231, the University of Oxford was completely unique at the time as a source of secular and religious education married with the study of Greek works due to their rediscovery in western Europe during the medieval period. Here, young men from wealthy families were sent to study philosophy, arts, and the Scriptures. Unlike modern universities, Oxford is comprised primarily of something like 38 colleges, to which you apply for admission directly. Each college is self-contained, with dorms, dining halls, a chapel, and faculty that you come to Oxford expressly to study (or, as they say, “read”) with. Here, if you choose to read archaeology, for example, the dons in your college will set your reading and topics, and then you’re on your own for the week. You might spend some days in the Radcliffe Camera or the Bodleian Library, or sit classes in the Faculty of Archaeology or History, but you’re primarily on your own as you study and work towards a thesis topic. Many of these colleges have been founded by wealthy men looking to support a particular demographic in Oxford, all with famous names and reputations like Jesus College, Exeter College, Christchurch College, etc.

Above is a photo from the courtyard of Lincoln College, which Ashley and I were able to pop in to thanks to a lovely tour we took with a old Lebanese Oxford alum who knew the strings to pull to let us have a look inside the normally private colleges. It was also graduation weekend, so of course Oxford was more crowded than usual as families and their students, garbed in those iconic Oxford gowns, milled about the tiny city.

Settled in a little valley right at the start of the Thames river valley, Oxford straddles two small rivers, the Cherwell and the Isis, which flow together just outside of the city as the headwaters of the Thames before flowing east across southern England, through London, and straight to the Thames Estuary in the Channel. When one climbs the hillsides outside of Oxford and looks down into the valley on a foggy day, only the dozens and dozens of spires from all of the churches and chapels can be seen above the haze. Thus, as one poet put it, Oxford is truly the city of the “dreaming spires.”

One of the most important aspects of our time in Oxford was our visits to world-famous museums. We visited the Oxford Museum of Natural History, in a grand old building with vaulted iron-wrought ceilings, statues of famous scientists ringing the chambers, and columns all made of marble and granite from various locales all across England. Though the Museum has done a wonderful job maintaining its old antiquarian feel with rows upon rows of large glass cases stuffed full of artifacts and skeletons, the interpretation was modern and well done. The focus was on not only the science and natural history of the objects, but on how they came to be in Oxford and more well-known stories, including the mummified skeletons of the last Dodo birds kept in captivity in Oxford before their extinction. These birds, overweight and clumsy due to their unnatural diet so far from the Indian Ocean, were seen by an Oxford academic and later incorporated, along with many other wonders of the museum, into stories he told to a young girl named Alice while punting little skiffs down the river.

In the back of the museum was my treat: The Pitt Rivers Collection of Anthropology and World Archaeology. Sir Pitt-Rivers was a famous antiquarian and widely travelled collector whose first, massive collection formed the basis of the museums accessions. The museum is well-known amongst archaeologists for its history as an early archaeological museum, its famous artifacts, and the fact that it still looks like an old antiquarian museum, with three floors of case upon case upon case of every object ever used across the a long history of the world. From shrunken heads to revolvers to flutes to cloaks to drums to every sort of body adornment imaginable, everything has either been recovered archaeologically or ‘borrowed’ ethnographically from living groups. Unlike modern museums, there are very few labels here, just a case that says “Pottery – North America” and rows and rows and rows of ceramics (in this case, sadly, most acquired from the American south-west, which is all I ever see when I see “North American pottery” in British museums).

We also spent a few hours in the Ashmolean, another famous Oxford museum of archaeology and art. One again, despite being an old museum (Britain’s first public museum, actually), the Ashmolean has done a lovely job modernizing their interpretation and had a lovely collection from across the world on display.

In addition, one of the draws to Oxford for me is the connection to such literary figures (aside from Lewis Carroll, alluded to above) as C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien. Lewis and Tolkien, among others, were in a little group known as the Inklings during the 1940s and 1950s. They’d meet a few times a week either at Lewis’ house or a pub known as the Eagle and Child to discuss their thoughts and works, with Lewis even presenting early drafts of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe to the Inklings at the Eagle and Child one evening over a pint. Because of this, Tolkien’s allusion to the Eagle and Child in appendices to The Lord of the Rings as the “Bird and Baby” pub in the Shire, and my incurable nerd condition, we course had to pop in for a quick pint!