Oxford is basically Hogwarts. 7/3/13 Part One

5:30 in the morning is just a horrific time to be awake. I don’t care what timezone you’re in, pre-6 am is SLEEPING time. Still, we had to catch an early train to Oxford, so 5:30 am it was. Bleary-eyed, we raced to Paddington  station, only to discover, naturally, that our train was delayed. Sigh. Travelling is the worst. When we got to Oxford, it was still early morning, and the town was quiet.

Oxford is your typical college town, if your college is one of the oldest in the Western world, and has

buildings from the 1400s. My college had Shaw Hall, completed as temporary classrooms in the ‘50s, with leaky radiators. Not quite as impressive. Oxford near the train station is a lot of shops and restaurants, including a little gem we saw called “Opium Den.” As you wind your way through the city, however, these immense sandstone buildings. The one we stopped at first was the Bodleian Library.

The main room in the building housing the Bodleian is this bright and enchanting, welcoming room. It was also recognizable, because it was the filming location for the Hospital Wing in Hogwarts, as well as the room where Yule Ball dance training took place. The room is incredibly detailed, as it should be, because they worked on it for 60 years. There’s actually a part of the carving that suddenly stops, either because they ran out of money, or someone said they were done putting up with construction that lasts 60 years. Puts any of your home construction projects in perspective, huh?

Another room of interest was the Oxford court. Apparently, if someone associated with the university was arrested, they could request to be tried at Oxford. Oxford had its own justice, complete with its jailers and prison. Oxford justice was swift, and could be harsh, but there was no death penalty at Oxford, so people who committed serious offenses could be safer at the Oxford court. Apparently the Oxford court is no more, and students and faculty are now subject to the regular courts.

After leaving behind all our bags and any cameras or phones, we were buzzed through security to go up into the proper library. Remember the Harry Potter library? It was like that, only smaller, real, and with the most amazing smell of old, leather books. There was even a chained book left as an example for how all the books in the collection were once stored. Apparently, since the chains were attached at the page side of the book, all books needed to be put on the shelf spine-side in, which meant that people couldn’t read the spines, so they had to draw numbers on the pages to differentiate them. This seems like a long drawn out process that was replaced years later by just having someone search the bags of leaving scholars.

There was no light or heat in the library, until 1967, because fire was banned from the library. Apparently, the library would have a steward who would ring a bell when he judge there was no longer enough sunlight to read by. There was actually never a major disaster in the library, which is pretty astonishing, though the collection was gutted by King Henry V, when he left the church. The collection in that library room is the older and rare texts. There are even two screened reading rooms that were once reserved for the King and Queen. The collection is much, much larger, however. It’s included in another building, the Radcliffe Camera, which we were also able to see, and offsite. There are currently 11 million printed items. Yeah. Can you imagine cataloging that? I guess that the Bodleian really ended up having the first catalogue in the UK.

Right across the courtyard was the Radcliffe Camera, a perfectly circular building that houses the more modern parts of the collection. I guess it’s usually full of students, but they’re on holiday. It was apparently the site of the celebration following the defeat of Napoleon (the first time). What was really cool, though, was that the two buildings are collected via two subterranean floors of book storage. I guess it used to be really creepy and dark, but recently it was modernized. Readers could send their requests for books via pneumatic tube to the library assistants. Then, the assistants would put the requested books onto trolleys and send them out via a track in the underground tunnels. It’s more modern, today, but the theory is the same.

Before I left the Bodleian, I made my way through a temporary display on Magical Books. They had original Tolkien drawings on display, including one of the Owlamoo, a owlish creature Tolkien created to help his son get over his fear of the one outside his bedroom window. There were original manuscript pages from C.S. Lewis and Phillip Pullman. There was also a model alethiometer from His Dark Materials that I desperately wanted.