Tag: History

The theme today was books and those who write them. I started in the Bodleian Library. I use the word “I” because I was the only one on the team willing to get up early enough to get in line at 9:00 a.m. to buy a ticket. I can see the inside of my eyelids at home. Why fly halfway across the world to sleep late?

TheBodleian Library is one of the oldest and largest in the world. It is the home of C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien letters and original manuscripts, as well as the Gutenberg Bible. Knowing this, I suggested Ann go to the Bodleian and ask to check out the Gutenberg Bible. “Just tell them you will be taking it across the street to the hotel and will return it later in the day, “ I said, “and if they refuse, politely remind them that it is a library. . . . and that you are part of the GSB team, of course.”

My motive in taking the tour was to see the Duke Humfrey’s Library in the Bodleian. I am a library connoisseur, and I am always looking for ideas on how to improve my own. Duke Humfreys’s did not disappoint, as you can see from the picture. It was also in the Duke Humphrey library where C.S. Lewis spent much time writing his first academic work on medieval literature, The Allegory of Love.

The rest of the team joined me in the afternoon for a rare treat: a visit to C.S. Lewis’s home in Oxford, called The Kilns. We saw almost all the rooms in the home, including Lewis’s den, study, and the room in which died on November 22, 1963.

Today was the Sabbath, and we only planned a few items on our agenda.

We walked to the Radcliffe Camera only to find signs in front of both entrances saying only “Readers” could enter. I consider myself a “reader”- I try to read 50 books a year – but I still felt the sign was not referring to me.

While standing there with the GSB team contemplating our options a gray-haired gentleman (and I use that word loosely) standing no more than 6 feet away crepitated, or as they say in the UK, “broke wind.” And in no small way, I might add; it was sustained and sonorous.

I looked at the rest of the team, but I was apparently the only one who heard it. And when I told them what he had done, no one else seemed surprised or offended. But we were at Oxford. In England. What about manners? Propriety? The Privy Council?

We stil had the Bodleian Library on our agenda, but there again we were turned away. We were told we were too late to get tickets. I used the opportunity to stress to the rest of the team again the importance of getting an early start, but that was met with the same disinterestedness they had shown to unrestrained flatulence.

Our study of the conversion of England to the kingdom of God has been moving in reverse order. We started with Windsor Castle and England’s most recent and longest serving Christian monarch, Elizabeth II.

Then yesterday, we focused exclusively on C.S. Lewis, a predecessor of Elizabeth. Today, we continued the journey backwards in time, this time 1,150 years, to visit the places and person of Alfred the Great.

Our first stop was at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. The Ashmolean holds The Alfred Jewel. It’s believed to be a pointer Alfred sent to each of the bishops in England, along with his English translation of Pope Gregory the Great’s book, Pastoral Care.

The inscription on the jewel reads, “Alfred ordered me made.” The jewel was made in the 2nd half of the 9th century A.D. and is considered one of England’s greatest treasures from this time period.

We spent only a little over an hour at the Ashmolean because we had to leave for Wantage, the birthplace of Alfred the Great.

The drive through the English countryside was accompanied by interesting discussion. Ann mentioned an article in the London Times about a person tried and found guilty of “misadventure,” the British legal term for an injury caused by someone engaged in an otherwise lawful act. We chuckled at the English’s strange use of their own language, just as we had yesterday with the phrase, “privy council” – is it advice given about use of a toilet or something else?

C.S. Lewis spent 29 years in Oxford, and although we had visited Oxford before, we had not fully explored the sites of the life of C.S. Lewis. Today we did.

Thanks to the C.S. Lewis Foundation for publishing a wonderful self-guided C.S. Lewis walking tour of Oxford on its website. It directs you to the places Lewis lived, worked, and worshipped, as well as the place of his conversion, all in a very orderly fashion. You can find the walking tour guide here.

We began at Blackwells, one of the oldest and largest bookstores in the world, which sits between two pubs Lewis often visited with J.R.R. Tolkien and other friends: The White Horse Inn and the Kings Arms. We then followed Holywell Street to the place where Lewis stayed his first night in Oxford.

The best stop on the tour though was Magdalen College, where we saw (from outside) the room in the “New Building” where Lewis converted to theism in 1929, later writing, “I gave in and admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed: perhaps that night, the most dejected and reluctant convert in all of England.”