Oxonmoot 2006

[Mithalwen]

"I'm travelling to the West this week"

Ah well Oxford is delightful but to visit Valinor probably beats it.....

[Bêthberry]

I'd hardly say I live in Valinor, but then I'm not as far West as Estelyn is going.

Any chance any of you will be looking out for Phillip Pullman while you are at Oxenmoot?

[Lalwendë]

I will be, in fact I'm still finishing the Amber Spyglass so if I do he'll get bombarded with questions. However, he'll probably be holed up in his shed. I'll make do with looking for places from HDM instead.

[Bêthberry]

One of the great delights when I first read HDM was relishing the description of Jordan College and its environs. The Gyptians' boats sounded so much more fun than mere punting too.

I think the Bodleian has a special Tolkien collection. I wonder if any of it is available for public reading?

[Estelyn Telcontar]

At this year's German Tolkien Society meeting, one of our members, a university professor and recognized Tolkien scholar, told us about the application process through which he went to be able to research the Tolkien materials in the Bodleian. Even those books and papers which are available for "public viewing" are limited, and there are more that aren't even listed in the catalogue, though the knowledgable may at least hear of their existence. (He wasn't allowed to see them.)

So if you'd like to study in the Tolkien section, you must have an official reason and the scholarly background to be entitled to access the materials - plus time for a lengthy permission process.

[Mithalwen]

Ooh but punting is wonderful ... friends, picnic, summers day... I might take Gaudy Night to read on the train.... I thought Northern Lights wonderful but I thought the trilogy gradually deteriorated ..on at least I enjoyed Subtle Knife less and Amber Spyglass very little... at least one alternative universe too many for my poor brain. I do think my Daemon might be a badger though

[narfforc]

I will be traveling by train from the grim north, as I am still trying to finish writing The Lord of the Grins, I won't be reading. I have just finished The Houses of Squealing and I am halfway through The Last Debacle, so I am hoping to finish The Back Gate Opens by the time I arrive at Oxford, where I will bore Lal and Davem with stories of Paragon son of Paramount, Stranger of the North, Dulladan, Halfstoned, Alesser Heir of Everdulls son Evenduller, and if I have enough courage and I am not under the influence of Orkbrew, I will attempt to sing The Ballad of Gil-galad on ents night.

[Lalwendë]

Ha ha, thought you'd got rid of me eh? No, just saw a t'internet cafe for £1 for 45mins so had to come and post. No, I have not seen pullman, but we did try to go to Exeter College only to find it jammed up with trucks. So me being a nosey parker asks a bloke having a smoke in the back of a truck what was going on - they're filming Northern Lights this week. He says "Eh, what's it they're filimg?" to his mate, who told him, and then he says "It's s'posed to be like Lord of the Rings, innit?". I was trying to think of something to say but then remembered he was a Roadie and went "Wow, Coool!". And I've just seen Nicole Kidman in the back of a minibus coming out of Oriel college too. So they're obviously using both places. No chance of getting a look in Exeter this weekend for anyone thinking of it though, unless you smuggle yourself in as Daniel Craig's wig maker.

On more useful matters, they serve Magners in the Eagle & Child, and I saw the 'Ham letter' thing that the Inklings signed. It doesn't look like an original to me, sorry but I wouldn't put something like that up in a smoky pub. I thought about asking the landlord but then I instead got to complimenting him on the excellence of his beef stew.

This has a sticky keyboard by the way.

[Mithalwen]

Oh I miss Oxford ..if it were near the sea it would be perfect and I would try to move back forever ......

[narfforc]

Good news on the Magners, now wash your hands Lal.

[Roa_Aoife]

There are relatively few smials of the Tolkien Society in the U.S., and Texas does not have one. Just curious, but is any Yank out there a member of one of the state smials? I have always wondered how those work. I know there's a very active one in New York State.

The only one I know of is the Gathering of the Fellowship, which happens in different places every year. I don't know much about it, though. It was a grapevine mentioned among some friends of mine. (It's probably more movie related than book related.) I do know that Tolkien fans in the states tend to "bunny off" sci-fi/fantasy conventions. Of course, those are now bunnying off the anime conventions since the sudden rise of the otaku* sub-culture in the States and the gradual decline of the Trekkie. (So sad.)

*Yes, I am aware of what otaku means in Japanese culture. In American culture, however, it's no longer negative. In fact, most anime fans here think of it as a badge of honor that must be earned.

[Anguirel]

I'll be in Oxford on Friday for the English faculty open day, so if you see anyone who looks vaguely like me attempt to communicate in Elvish. Then see whether they look startled or amused.

Note: I will not on this occasion be dressed as the French King...

[Mithalwen]

What a disappointment ........ but then seeing as I won't arrive til Saturday I would have missed that pleasure ...

[narfforc]

Hi Roa_Aoife, there was a notice in Amon Hen 197 (Tolkien Society Bulletin), of a Future Smial Address in Austin, Texas, details c/o Mathom Editor, here is the email address:


mathom@tolkiensociety.org

another address that may help is:

Mike Foster
Box 743
County Road 1200N
Metamora,
IL61548-8465

Anyone wishing to join The Tolkien Society can do so online, just punch in Tolkien Society and there it is The Home Page.

Best of Luck to all, and hope to see more of you next year.

[narfforc]

Another Oxonmoot been and gone, enjoyed some conversations with Davem and Lalwende, enjoyed even more pints of Theakstons Old Peculiar, there was over 100 people for the reading at Tolkiens graveside. You all have one year to plan for Oxonmoot 2007, try and get to at least one in your life, I have made some great friends there.

[Lalwendë]

Anguirel - we were near there on Friday as we went to look at the Pitt Rivers so you may have heard me babbling on about the shrunken heads!

I hope Mithalwen has read all the books she bought (ruddy loads!) - we eventually found her after wandering about all day long and wondering who she might be, and she's very nice! No pink boots though! I hope you'll be there again, Mith, maybe to even stay over and join in the fun, which on Saturday involved a long drunken discussion after we avoided some atrocious 'music' by a member of the Tolkien Society and a famous Tolkien artist. Oh dear it was bad. Anyway, stay there and you'll get narfforc entertaining you on Sunday morning, but just don't stand behind him.

We met some great people, not least of who was Mithalwen! We were also introduced to Joanna Tolkien, though davem doesn't remember as he was drunk I've just told him about it now! Heard some great stories from the old timers. Watched all the eccentrics wandering about, and come up with a theory that the TS is secretly a Freemasons' recruiting society after noting that there was a bloke in an apron, and watching the Springle Ring dancers who had rolled up trouser legs and ribbons round their arms.

I hope its in better accommodation next year - I've slept for 11 hours last night to make up for it! It got me all grumpy cause I need a good night's sleep so on Saturday I just got hammered so I'd collapse anyway, which I did. But the grub was good, apart from the Friday dinner. We were being tight and didnt shell out £28 for food we didn't fancy so we ate a picnic instead, and it turned out that there wasnt enough food to go round anyway. So we didnt need to press our noses against the windows like destitute orphans.

I liked the slideshow, which went through art inspired by Tolkien, looking at the good and bad, but was dreading something I liked coming up and being slagged off. Which it did when they got snooty about the art in the Day bestiary. OK so the text is bad in that book, but I thought the pictures were great!

Good show by Bob Blackman who wrote the new book about Tolkien in Birmingham, looking at the local history of the Sarehole area. And another entertaining one about Tolkien, women and oxford, which i listened to while sitting outside as the mic was pretty loud, and it meant I could get in some more smoking. Shop was in the Maggie Thatcher centre, appropriate. I didn't manage to think of anything to deface the sign with, but if I go there again I'll go armed with 'Coal Not Dole' stickers, meh-heh. Shop was excellent of course too, I couldn't decide what to buy....almost, though it took some deciding.

[Child of the 7th Age]

Thanks so much for these reports. The next best thing to being there. Sigh....

Is that book by Bob Blackman out yet? I couldn't bring up anything on the UK Amazon. Perhaps it's being locally distributed? The whole question of Tolkien's local and childhood associations fascinates me, and I'd love to get hold of that book if you have any more info.

[Mithalwen]

I went to a few other lectures and will transcribe my notes if anyone would be interested?

[Lalwendë]

Originally Posted by Child of the 7th Age

Is that book by Bob Blackman out yet? I couldn't bring up anything on the UK Amazon. Perhaps it's being locally distributed? The whole question of Tolkien's local and childhood associations fascinates me, and I'd love to get hold of that book if you have any more info.

Here's a
link to the book, which I've had for a couple of months. It's very good, both as a Tolkien book and as a local history book, and would be great for anyone wanting to explore the area in Birmingham. He's put a lot of work into sourcing the old pictures, and had some funny tales to tell about the area, the trespassing adventures of the Tolkien brothers, the White Ogre and a modern day horseman dressed as a Black Rider who found his horse, Equinox, would not cross the river!

[Feanor of the Peredhil]

Originally Posted by Mithalwen

I went to a few other lectures and will transcribe my notes if anyone would be interested?

Always interested.

[Lalwendë]

I didn't get any notes because I left my room without a biro and was damned if I was going to trek back up four flights of the most rickety stairs in England to get it. Especially after three hours' sleep.

[Mithalwen]

Well having done my MEI and RPG stuff I will do so tomorrow Sad really - after so many years of studying I "have" to make notes - a kind of OCD?

[narfforc]

I didn't take any notes, because I couldn't hear what they were saying from the Lamb and Flag.

[narfforc]

I've moved this conversation over to the Oxonmoot thread Lal, as it isn't really relevent on the other. The springmoot is something that is officially TS, this Yulemoot is normally done locally by one of the Smials, we are trying to do a bigger version up north. The main reason is that the TS is very south-centric, which is fair enough, for some strange reason there is more of them, and I often wonder why that is. Why we do not have more members up north does vex me, it is almost a self admission that all we think of is flat caps and whippets.


I despair of my Northern Kindred.

[Lalwendë]

Good idea!

I mean, I often find meself spending half the morning chasing our whippet up the back ginnels and tripping over urchins sucking on a bit of tripe, but I never thought of myself as that different to our wine quaffing Southern chums ( ) until I noticed how hard some of them at Oxonmoot found it to understand what I was saying. There's the other thing that of course a northern moot would be easier to get to. I don't know why there aren't more Northern members of TS though. Maybe there are but they find it awkward to make the journey to Oxford so never get to Oxonmoot?

[narfforc]

Well I know there are a few Downers who realise that the M1 isn't cobbled passed The Watford Gap, so where are you Northerners?, put the whippet in the kennels for few days, polish your clogs and get your best suit out the Pawn Shop, come and meet some crazy people.

[Mithalwen]

Originally Posted by narfforc

Well I know there are a few Downers who realise that the M1 isn't cobbled passed The Watford Gap, so where are you Northerners?, put the whippet in the kennels for few days, polish your clogs and get your best suit out the Pawn Shop, come and meet some crazy people.

Past Watford maybe but not I think past Brum

[narfforc]

Oi.......................

[Lalwendë]

Mithalwen's not far wrong about the M1 past Sheffield. It's like the surface of the moon.

[The Saucepan Man]

Personally, I get befuddled if I roam much further north than the Thames ...

[davem]

Originally Posted by The Saucepan Man

Personally, I get befuddled if I roam much further north than the Thames ...

We are much more sophisticated up here, its true.

One Ring report with pics - for anyone who hasn't seen it http://www.theonering.net/perl/newsview/8/1158546460

[The Saucepan Man]

Originally Posted by davem

We are much more sophisticated up here, its true.

Well, if you are holding yourself up as representative, I would certainly concede the first seven letters of that characterisation.

[Lalwendë]

The report amused me a bit. Serenely beautiful college? Well, quite average as far as historic buildings go, actually (having been spoiled in my eyes by spending several previous days in Oxford surrounded by far more beautiful buildings), and spoiled further by the carbuncles of the Prisoner Cell Block H accommodation blocks. But the lawns were nice. And they had a cat. Which bit davem. It was a 'friendly bite' though.

He also did not mention the streams of people running in horror from the marquee as two illustrious Tolkienites struck up with the most godawful 'music' I've had the displeasure to hear in a long time. Though as this is a tradition even those who also hate the 'music' won't hear of it being removed from the 'ents' - must be a bit of Blitz spirit or something.

And as Mithalwen and myself sagely noted, Merry & Pippin's Dance Workshop is a thinly disguised Masonic Lodge recruiting exercise....

[Mithalwen]

The computer just ate my first start at this and it is clearly and effective editor since the only aspect of my early morning journey that is likely to have any interest to anyone else is that there was fog on the downs!

I got to Oxford just after 8.30 and having not been in the city centre for several years and not by train for even longer (when I visited Tolkien's grave the other year I was on the way to Rugby and just nipped off the bypass), I was a bit disorientated. Brett's Burger shack had given way to a Business School but I soon was on more familiar ground and happy to be in, what is for me, the loveliest city in England - blemishes are redeemed by the magical effect of light on the cotswold stone.

I am afraid vanity won over learning in that having spilt some coffee on my top and not being certain it would be cool enought to keep my sweater on - I made a detour via Next.... then seeing how sleep deprived and haglike I looked in the harsh shoplights and realising that my make up was in another bag I then had to go to Boots for warpaint ... if there was a chance I would be introduced to Priscilla, I didn't want to frighten her .

By the time I got to Somerville, it was too late to go to the first lecture "Faithful Catholics and the Faithful of Numenor" ; I regret my vanity even more now since I realise the speaker, Murray Smith, was someone who made highly interesting and intelligent comments at a later lecture and I will certainly make his lectures a priority if I go again. The other option was going to the quiz nearly half way through and since "The Roots of Tolkien's Middle Earth" which Lalwende has already mentioned was to start shortly and I would be terribly frustrated by attending a quiz I couldn't participate in, I decided to go and tidy myself up and change my top. Bafflingly the stewards pointed me to the gents toilets so I was foiled again.. so hoping for more accurate information I asked where the lecture was and some passing chap with a stick offered to show me.

Fortunately, even though feeling slightly patronised by chappy telling me that Somerville used ot be a women's college I resisted the temptation to embroider the truth and tell him I had actually been to Oxford or to tell him that I was only going to this lecture becasue I was too late for the quiz since the stick was a pointer and not a costume prop and my guide was Bob Blackman himself.

The last lecture overran and so I sat on some steps, and watched people arrive. This will sound daft but you have no idea how wierd it was to spot davem and Lalwende. A bit like seeing someone in real life that you know only from TV - you know them but you don't. I wasn't quite psyched up enought to accost them at that point - I am struck at times by crippling shyness - so I slunk into the back of the hall. I have got some notes from this but since it was slide based I am not sure how interesting the words are without the pictures. Also I did spend some time "putting my face on" (though I didn't change my top!)... not quite that uncouth though I am sure my mother would be turning in her grave.

My notes are thin and I wish I had buckled down when this was fresher in my mind. Also there were somethings that I found interesting personally that may not be of general interest since my parents both came from the West Midlands and he showed slides of the ship they sailed in from South Africa ( which belonged to the shipping line my mother worked for many years later) and of its port of arrival, Southampton (where I was born) as it looked at the time.

Blackman is a native of Birmingham and is perhaps a little biased towards seeing most links to Tolkien in that area, however I personally would have thought that arriving in a England after a long journey might have been echoed in Frodos arrival in Eressea - a green country through a veil of rain... but perhaps that is my local bias.

Perhaps the most interesting thing (withoutht e benefit of pictures) was RB's comment that he thought that World War 1 permeated LOTR and that he felt that shell holes full of water and bodies were inspiration for the Dead Marshes and teh dehumanising effect of the trenches were the origins of the orcs - dehumanised fighting beings.

Other little points were that he thought that Bomabadil was the Green Man, which seems fair enough to me: that Ronald and Hilary used to trespass for mushrooms, that millers were not popular in village folklore but that also mills are dangerous places and it was perhaps for their own good that the miller was so scary!

While certainly Tolkien did have some strong memories of his time at Sarehole, I think RB's assertion that it would have been a different world if Tolkien had ended up ANYWHERE else.

While he found places which could be identified with book places, for the more general geographic locations, I could find many similar places in my own locale. I think he would have had to be relocated to wilder country further north or west, or flatter land in East Anglia to give a vastly different landscape. Some of the links made made me thing "Yes but so what?" - for example there is a Greenhill Road in Sarehole and Greenhills Country in the Shire. Green hills are not particularly rare commodities in England.

However to be fair the talk was curtailed and we didn't have time to see more of the slides. I certainly would be interested in reading the full book sometime. He also told a glorious anecdote about a Tolkien Weekend at Sarehole when there was a surprise (to teh general public) appearance of the Black Knight from Warwick Castle dressed as a Nazgul on his huge black horse. A voice modifier meant that " Have you seen Baggins?" was authentic enough to freak out small children!

To be continued.

[Lalwendë]

Nice report! And now I remember you sitting on the steps! Was I wandering around with no shoes on? I bet I must've looked like a scary nutter, when in fact I just had hellish blisters from my route marches round Oxford that week.

Murray's talk might well have been very good - he did one on Stewardship last year at Birmingham and he knows how to put a good argument together. He's also a barrister though so he gets very complex and I think 9am was a bit of an unfair time to put him on, as frankly its a scary time, especially following the apocalyptic drunkenness of the preceeding evening which left a fair few people a bit ruffled and bog-eyed. We were actually in the maggie Thatcher centre at 9am getting first dibs on the goodies in the dealers' Room. Greedy capitalist pigs eh?

Try Waterstones for the Bob blackman book - that's where i got my copy, and they still have some in in our local branch.

[Mithalwen]

well there will be more of Murray later ... and it surprises me not at all that he is a barrister ..there was a certain amount of cross examination!!!!

Yes you were shoeless but I was thinking it was agood idea since I had just changed from scruffy shoes I had worn to drive / walk in to my "nice shoes" .. which were a bit OTT for Oxonmoot .. but we country mice feel we have to dress up for town and my poor blistered feet limited my choice....

[Lalwendë]

Originally Posted by Mithalwen

.. but we country mice feel we have to dress up for town and my poor blistered feet limited my choice....

Well I must be really citified by now - I attempted Stanton Moor in a blasting gale on Wednesday with a wicker handbag over my shoulder. I ended up having a doze on the turf in a prehistoric quarry near a standing stone which was the only place with any shelter.

My feet are still in tatters from Oxford. Ruddy cobblestones.