J.R.R. Tolkien's Oxford Walking Tour Oxford | StoryStride: Walking Tours

Every Stop Has a Story

Where Legend Began

A nineteen-year-old J.R.R. Tolkien arrived at this college in 1911 already drifting from his Classics scholarship toward Old Norse and Finnish, the start of a lifelong habit of inventing languages so consuming that he later said his stories existed to give his languages a home, not the other way around.

Cradle of the Ring

While grading a stack of tedious student exam papers at this college, J.R.R. Tolkien was struck by a sudden bolt of inspiration and scribbled what would become the opening line of The Hobbit onto a stray scrap of paper: 'In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.'

Merton's Masterpiece

Tolkien so often retreated to Merton's private Fellows' Garden to escape the 'Great Wave' of fans after The Lord of the Rings made him famous that he compared its quiet, walled seclusion to the hidden valley of Rivendell, and the stone table where he worked on manuscripts through the summer still stands there today.

Archives of Imagination

This library holds the actual Tolkien archives, including his meticulously hand-drawn maps of Middle-earth and the original watercolors of Smaug, ancient vellum guarded under a solemn oath against fire that Tolkien recited by day while writing the literal flames of Mount Doom by night.

Midday at the Bird and Baby

Above the fireplace in this pub's back-room 'Rabbit Room' hangs a handwritten note from the Inklings to the landlord reading 'The undersigned, having just partaken of your ham, have drunk to your health,' a cheerful relic of the same Tuesday-morning gatherings where J.R.R. Tolkien read The Hobbit aloud to a writers' group blunt enough to make him rewrite anything that fell flat.

Across the Road for a Pint

This unassuming tavern across from the Eagle and Child offers a rare glimpse of Tolkien off duty, not the Oxford professor or the mythmaker but simply one half of a decades-long friendship with C.S. Lewis, the two of them trading draft chapters over pints once tourists made their usual booth too crowded for comfort.

Sitting With the Ents

Tolkien's favorite tree in this garden, a Pinus nigra with strangely limb-like branches, is widely believed to have inspired the Ents, and one of the last photographs ever taken of him shows Tolkien standing proudly beside it not long before his death.

Beyond the Grey Havens

J.R.R. Tolkien and his wife Edith are buried together beneath a simple granite headstone here, with the names 'Beren' and 'Lúthien' inscribed beneath their own, forever linking their marriage to the legendary hero and Elven princess whose love story sits at the emotional heart of his entire mythology.

J.R.R. Tolkien's Oxford Walking TourOxford