{"id":8941,"date":"2024-11-13T08:13:10","date_gmt":"2024-11-13T15:13:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/georgerrmartin.com\/notablog\/?p=8941"},"modified":"2025-04-06T14:30:48","modified_gmt":"2025-04-06T20:30:48","slug":"a-stop-at-oxford","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/georgerrmartin.com\/notablog\/2024\/11\/13\/a-stop-at-oxford\/","title":{"rendered":"A Stop at Oxford"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Oxford is a legendary place.\u00a0 One of the world&#8217;s great universities, and the literary capital of England, rich with history, it has figured in more novels than I can count, including many classic works of fantasy.\u00a0\u00a0 Philip Pullman&#8217;s amazing trilogy HIS DARK MATERIAL is set there.\u00a0 So is BABEL, OR THE NECESSITY FOR VIOLENCE, R.F. Kuang&#8217;s Nebula-winning bestseller.\u00a0\u00a0 It was the model for Hogwart&#8217;s in J.K. Rowling&#8217;s Harry Potter books, and a lot of the Potter films were shot there. \u00a0 And of course J.R.R. Tolkien lived and taught there.<\/p>\n<p>Somehow I never made it there on any of my previous visits to the UK, but I was determined to not it miss it this time around. \u00a0\u00a0 When the Oxford Writers House invited me to join Pullman for a panel discussion on Writing Fantasy, I had to say yes.\u00a0\u00a0 I had never met Pullman &#8230; though I&#8217;m a huge fan of HIS DARK MATERIALS, with its daemons and armored bears. \u00a0 (<em>Armored bears!\u00a0<\/em> So cool!!) \u00a0\u00a0 It would have been a thrill to share a platform with him.\u00a0\u00a0 I\u00a0 also wanted to\u00a0 pop into the Eagle &amp; Child as well,\u00a0 the pub where Tolkien and C.S. Lewis and the Inklings got together to share a pint and talk about books.<\/p>\n<p>Alas, it turned out that the Bird &amp; Baby (as the Eagle &amp; Child was nicknamed by the locals)\u00a0 was closed for renovations.\u00a0\u00a0 And then Philip Pullman got ill, and had to cancel, so I was left to fend for myself.<\/p>\n<p>Fortunately I have lots of practice with fending for myself.<\/p>\n<p>Instead of a panel, the event turned into an interview and booksigning.\u00a0 We had a sold out crowd (about 450, they told me) lots of eager students and aspiring writers, and more questions than I could possibly answer if I had been there for a week instead of a day. \u00a0\u00a0 And beforehand I got a short tour of Oxford itself, which was just as magical as I thought it would be.\u00a0\u00a0 The library was astonishing, and they even showed me some of J.R.R. Tolkien&#8217;s working papers&#8230; including his first vision of Helm&#8217;s Deep, which he drew on the back of a student essay he was grading.<\/p>\n<p>Oxford was kind enough to record the session, and upload it to YouTube.<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"George R. R. Martin in Oxford\" width=\"600\" height=\"338\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/jfy-whmkOpM?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>After the questions, we moved to the side of the room\u00a0 to sign books.\u00a0\u00a0 We had a wonderful group of fans and readers on hand.\u00a0\u00a0 Not all of them were Oxford students; we had people there from all over England, and some from across the Channel as well.\u00a0\u00a0 Several presented me with handwritten fan letters, and I can&#8217;t tell you how much I appreciated that.\u00a0 The letters were heartfelt, thoughtful, and very knowledgeable about my work.\u00a0\u00a0 The sort of letters that Tolkien himself might have been moved by.<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone wp-image-9004\" src=\"https:\/\/georgerrmartin.com\/notablog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/08\/IMG_0016-768x1024.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"314\" height=\"419\" srcset=\"https:\/\/georgerrmartin.com\/notablog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/08\/IMG_0016-768x1024.jpg 768w, https:\/\/georgerrmartin.com\/notablog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/08\/IMG_0016-225x300.jpg 225w, https:\/\/georgerrmartin.com\/notablog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/08\/IMG_0016.jpg 900w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 314px) 100vw, 314px\" \/><\/p>\n<p>I had a wonderful time.\u00a0 I only wish our visit had been longer.\u00a0 Oxford was just as fascinating as I hoped it would be, and I could easily have spent days exploring it. \u00a0 But the road goes ever on, and I had promises to keep, so the best we could do was spend the night, and then head off back to London&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>But not before we made a stop on the outskirts of town, to visit the graveyard where Tolkien and his wife were laid to read.\u00a0\u00a0 I could not leave town without paying homage to the greatest fantasist of all time.<\/p>\n<p>But I&#8217;ll save my thoughts about that for the next installment of my &#8220;travel blog.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>I hope I will be able to return to Oxford the next time I make it over to England.\u00a0\u00a0 There&#8217;s so much left to see.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Oxford is a legendary place.\u00a0 One of the world&#8217;s great universities, and the literary capital of England, rich with history, it has figured in more novels than I can count, including many classic works of fantasy.\u00a0\u00a0 Philip Pullman&#8217;s amazing trilogy HIS DARK MATERIAL is set there.\u00a0 So is BABEL, OR THE NECESSITY FOR VIOLENCE, R.F. [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[218],"tags":[50,28,31,76,40,19],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/georgerrmartin.com\/notablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8941"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/georgerrmartin.com\/notablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/georgerrmartin.com\/notablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/georgerrmartin.com\/notablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/georgerrmartin.com\/notablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8941"}],"version-history":[{"count":28,"href":"https:\/\/georgerrmartin.com\/notablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8941\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9666,"href":"https:\/\/georgerrmartin.com\/notablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8941\/revisions\/9666"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/georgerrmartin.com\/notablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8941"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/georgerrmartin.com\/notablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8941"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/georgerrmartin.com\/notablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8941"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}