See also *Kainendan.
Outline of Phonology see Quenya: Outline of Phonology
Over Old Hills and Far Away. Poem, published in *The Book of Lost Tales, Part One (1983), pp. 108–10.
The poet is lured from his bed by the sound of a flute. He finds Tinfang Warble (cf. *Tinfang Warble) ‘dancing there, / Fluting and tossing his old white hair, Till it sparkled like frost in a winter moon’; but the piper slips ‘through the reeds like a mist in the glade’. The poet follows ‘the hoot’ of a ‘twilight flute’ ‘over old hills and far away / Where the harps of the Elvenfolk softly play’ (The Book of Lost Tales, Part One, pp. 109–10).
The poem exists in five texts, the latest of which was published in The Book of Lost Tales, Part One together with selected earlier readings. According to an apparently contemporaneous note on an early manuscript of the poem, Tolkien composed Over Old Hills and Far Away in January–February 1916; at the time, he was in Brocton army camp, *Staffordshire. A later manuscript, however, is inscribed by Tolkien ‘Brocton Camp, Christ[mas]–Jan[uary] 1915–16’, while another, presumed to be the latest version, is marked ‘Brocton 1916? Oxford 1927’, suggesting revision after Tolkien had returned to Oxford; but the latter inscription is struck through.
Oxford and environs. The city of Oxford, where Tolkien lived and worked for most of his life, lies north-west of London at the meeting place of two rivers, the Cherwell and the Isis (as the upper part of the Thames is known locally). A settlement existed there as early as the eighth century, by a ford used for oxen, hence Oxford, and a town was established by the year 912. Oxford received its city charter in 1155. It became an important crossroads, and trade flourished. The University of Oxford grew up there in the twelfth century.
The importance of Oxford (the place) in Tolkien’s life has demanded that it be treated in detail, and it has been most convenient to divide this treatment into three parts: one concerned with Tolkien’s homes in Oxford, a second with buildings, businesses, colleges, and other features within central Oxford, and a third with places that Tolkien knew near Oxford but which are outside the city proper. The history and operation of the University of Oxford are discussed in a separate entry, *Oxford, University of.
TOLKIEN’S OXFORD HOMES
Tolkien went up to Exeter College in Michaelmas Term 1911. Until the end of Trinity Term 1914 he lived in a building called ‘Swiss Cottage’, which looked out on Turl Street at the Broad Street end; see his sketch Turl Street, Oxford in Artist and Illustrator, fig. 19, and his cover for an ‘Exeter College Smoker’ programme reproduced in Life and Legend, p. 26, and The Tolkien Family Album, p. 32. He had a bedroom and a sitting-room, in his first year (1911–12) at no. 7 on the no. 8 staircase, and afterward moved to no. 9 on the no. 7 staircase. He paid rent for these rooms as well as a fee for the hire of furniture. ‘Swiss Cottage’ seems to have been so named because it had a gable and exposed timber frame reminiscent of Swiss architecture. Its construction reused elements of the Prideaux Buildings, built in 1620 and demolished in 1856. A photograph of these buildings is reproduced on p. 38, and one of the ‘Swiss Cottage’ on p. 40, in Frances Cairncross, ed., Exeter College: The First 700 Years (2013); the latter is also reproduced in John Garth, Tolkien at Exeter College (2014), p. 20. ‘Swiss Cottage’ was later replaced by the building today occupied by the specialist art bookshop operated by Blackwell’s.
During the academic year 1914–15 Tolkien shared rooms at 59 St John Street with his friend *Colin Cullis. St John Street connects Wellington Square with Beaumont Street, west of and parallel to St Giles’. Tolkien found living there ‘a delicious joy compared with the primitive life of college’ (quoted in Biography, p. 72). It was at this address that he wrote, at least, the poems You & Me and the Cottage of Lost Play (*The Little House of Lost Play: Mar Vanwa Tyaliéva) and *Goblin Feet.
In late 1918, Tolkien having accepted an offer to join the staff of the New English Dictionary (*Oxford English Dictionary), he and his wife *Edith, their son *John, and Edith’s cousin *Jennie Grove moved into rooms at 50 St John Street let by a Miss Mahon. From there it was only a short walk to the Old Ashmolean (see below) in Broad Street, where the Oxford English Dictionary editorial offices were located.
In late summer 1919, his income at last sufficient to rent a small house, Tolkien moved with his family to 1 Alfred Street (Pusey Street). Alfred Street connects St John Street and St Giles’; it was renamed Pusey Street in 1925. A photograph of 1 Alfred Street at that time is reproduced in The Tolkien Family Album, p. 43. John Tolkien recalled the boyhood sight of elephants in the St Giles’ Fair led down Alfred Street for morning exercise: as they passed the Tolkiens’ dining-room window ‘they blocked out the light’ (The Tolkien Family Album, p. 43). In early 1921 the family moved to *Leeds, Tolkien having taken up the Readership in English Language at the University in October 1920.
Although Tolkien became Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford as of Michaelmas Term 1925, it was not until 7 January 1926 that he and his family moved into their next Oxford home. This was at 22 Northmoor Road in North Oxford, ‘L-shaped and of pale brick, with one wing running towards the road’ (Humphrey Carpenter, Biography, p. 113). Photographs taken in its garden are reproduced in The Tolkien Family Album, pp. 50–2. A small sketch by Tolkien of the front of 22 Northmoor Road is reproduced in Artist and Illustrator, fig. 77.
North Oxford is a residential suburb situated on land once owned largely by St John’s College, Oxford, extending (in one definition) from St Giles’ Church in the south to near Summertown in the north, and divided in the centre by the Woodstock and Banbury Roads. The College began to develop the property, meadows or pasture land beyond the built-up part of Oxford, in the middle of the nineteenth century. Northmoor Road, to the east of the Banbury Road, was built in the area known as the Bardwell Estate, the last substantial section of North Oxford to be developed by St John’s College, beginning in the 1890s, and a section reserved for the best class of houses. According to Tanis Hinchcliffe in North Oxford (1992),
by 1915 when the North Oxford estate was nearly complete, the suburb had been building for fifty years and the area had absorbed the middle-class suburban ethos. The sequestered character of the suburban village had combined with the necessary conformity of the inner suburb, to produce that peculiar character which displayed itself in retreat behind walls and hedges and a jealous concern for accepted norms, whether laid down by the landlord’s covenants or by local custom. [p. 87]
No. 1 Northmoor Road was first leased by the College in 1899. The first lease of no. 22, with Tolkien the original lessee, was recorded in 1925. No. 22 was designed by a local architect, Christopher Wright, who was also responsible for five other houses in the upper numbers in the road.
Edith Tolkien always thought no. 22 too small for their growing family, and with the arrival of a daughter, *Priscilla, in 1929 a larger house became a necessity. Fortunately in that year a neighbouring house became available, and on 14 January 1930 the Tolkiens moved to 20 Northmoor Road. ‘This second house was broad and grey, more imposing than its neighbour, with small leaded windows and a high slate roof’ (Biography, pp. 113–14). It had been built for Oxford bookseller and publisher *Basil Blackwell in 1924 by a local architect, Frederick E. Openshaw. Its rooms were not large, but there were many of them. The most exciting room in the house, as far as the Tolkien children were concerned, was their father’s study:
The walls were lined with books from floor to ceiling, and it contained a great black lead stove, the source of considerable drama every day …. The study was very much the centre of Ronald’s home life and the centre of his study was his desk. Over the years the top of his desk continued to show familiar landscapes: his dark brown wooden tobacco jar, a Toby jug containing pipes, and a large bowl into which the ash from his pipe was regularly knocked out,
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