A Syllabus for my 2026 Oxford Project
Pulling on the threads that connect such Oxford luminaries as Newman, Ruskin, Morris, and Tolkien.
As readers of these Dispatches know, Daniel and I have spent two out of the last twenty-four months taking in the sights, sounds, literature, arts, music, and history of Oxford. It is a city/university we have come to love above all other cities on earth, not the least because it has served as an intellectual incubator for some of our most beloved thinkers and writers.
But now that we’ve gotten our sea-legs under us, as it were, and become comfortably familiar with many of the delights (and idiosyncracies) to be had by taking the tourist’s approach to Oxford, Daniel and I, planning our third visit come October (barring the usual “Act of God”—nowadays, it seems ever to be just around the corner, does it not?—thought we’d try something a little different: we’re going to apply for Reader’s Cards at the Bodleian Library. Our goals? To research and write a couple of deep-dive essays for Biblioll.
I believe academics call this sort of thing “independent, public-facing research”. Something like that.
To be sure, it will be fun (assuming we’re successful in our applications) to share a bit of research and reading space with with some of the top scholars in the world. As a tourist, I must admit, it can be a challenge to find a comfortable, quiet place in the congested City Centre to sit down with a coffee and a book for an hour or two, let alone commandeer enough elbow room to flip open a laptop and compose an essay.
Then there’s the bothersome fact that even the best coffeehouses in this greatest of all university towns are somehow lacking in, well, books. Particularly (as in my current situation) the latest research on Ruskin’s ekphrasis or Tolkien’s non-fiction reading. But anywhere in central Oxford, just down the street lies the Bodleian Library system, which holds something like thirteen million volumes in 28 separate libraries, from the medieval old Bod to Christopher Wren’s Radcliffe Camera; from the capacious Weston Library on the Broad (which houses many archives) to the beautiful Taylorian in St. Giles, which specializes in modern European languages and literatures. And on and on. As someone whose favorite job of all time was shelving books in the underground stacks of the University of Illinois graduate library—I still prefer Dewey Decimal to LC, by the way—I can only say that the prospect of having a closer connection to Oxford’s munificence of printed wisdom (or at least knowledge) gives me the kind of thrill that only fellow bibliophiles can appreciate.
And, if Ruby Granger’s Oxford-based vlogs have not steered me amiss, it is even permitted—gasp!—to bring in one’s favorite form of caffeine into some of the Bod’s libraries, as long as it’s contained in one of these bad boys.
Just for comparison, for a modest annual fee I’m counted a “Friend” of our much-treasured local university library. Several times a week I sit for hours at a table or in a carrel, reading and writing, and can even check out books. Our library holds about 410,000 volumes. Not too shabby for a town of about 22,000 residents. But while I’m immensely grateful for the quiet study space and a number of fine resources related to my project’s focus, I’ve already run into that bane of every scholar’s existence, whether academic or unaffiliated: I need books and articles that either aren’t to be had locally or are (because rare and often out-of-print) very expensive if purchased online. Assuming they’re even available online.
The good news is, most of those books and articles are available at the Bod. And that’s to say nothing of the Bod’s vast collection of archival materials. Hence my hope for a Bodleian Reader’s Card.
So just what is it I’m working on?
My 2026 Oxford Project
There’s a double meaning in the phrase, ‘Oxford project’. Not only is it a research/writing venture I hope to develop while in Oxford, it’s also a project focused on certain philosophical, literary, imaginative, and sometimes personal “Oxford-adjacent” threads—that’s the word that keeps arising in my mind—which seem woven into key patterns in J.R.R. Tolkien’s legendarium, and especially The Lord of the Rings. What intrigues me is that some of these same threads appear in the web of words and ideas of three other famous Oxonians of the century preceding Tolkien’s arrival in 1911: St. (Cardinal) John Henry Newman, the art critic John Ruskin, and novelist, poet, and designer William Morris, the leading light of the Arts & Crafts Movement. Like the Professor himself, all three of these men have fascinated, thrilled, and moved me for the better part of my life.
