Tolkien and Lewis, and Hoyle’s Rules of Games

While the female half of our family is off hunting leprechauns in Dublin and Galway, the male half (Andy and Phil) have been holding down the flat in England. Alison and Deb took a bus to a hotel at Heathrow on Thursday (July 31) and flew to Dublin early Friday morning. They were in Dublin until Monday morning, then took the three hour train ride to Galway. They will be in Galway until this Thursday, when Alison, Andy, and Deb meet up in Heathrow before Alison and Andy fly home and Deb returns to Oxford.

So what have Phil and Andy been doing in Oxford? On Friday, we went on a lengthy walking tour that showed us the Oxford of JRR Tolkien and CS Lewis. We saw houses they lived in, pubs they frequented (the Eagle and Child—mentioned earlier), lanes they walked frequently, colleges they attended or taught at, and plaques in their honor. One house where Tolkien lived is on Phil’s regular walk to work, so he has been past it dozens of times without recognizing its significance.

Here is the pub across the street from the Eagle and the Child. The Inklings frequented this pub during WWII when the Eagle and the Child would run out of beer.

We also visited a number of other colleges—more than we did on Andy’s actual college tour when he was in high school in fact. Lincoln College is where John Wesley was a professor, and we were allowed to see his study and rooms. These are not usually open to the public but Phil, flushed with the power of a University of Oxford faculty ID card, persuaded the porter to take us there. New College dates from the 14th century—well, it was new once—and includes some of the original city walls of Oxford. Other colleges on our visit were Balliol (which has a disputed claim to being the oldest college—certainly one of the nicest ones), Trinity (great gardens), Exeter (the Tolkien plaque and Inspector Morse filming sites) and Jesus College (pretty unremarkable actually).

We also went to the Hoyle’s Game Shop, which we also walk past daily. Andy loves board games, so we had been saving this visit for him. Do you know the expression, “According to Hoyle”, meaning that something that is in the rules? Or the book, Hoyles Rules of Games, which lists the rules for hundreds of different games? This is the shop behind those expressions, established in the mid-1700s. It is historically interesting, if a little small and dingy. But all of us might be a little dingy after 350 years of settling disputes over the rules, I guess. (We also went to a much larger and better game shop with no historical significance located on Cowley Road not far from our flat on Saturday.) So we have managed to stay busy.