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.