Magical Books: From the Middle Ages to Middle-earth

About the exhibition

From Bodleian’s unique holdings of these authors’ papers, the Magical Books exhibition includes a selection of Tolkien’s original artwork for The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings; C.S. Lewis’s ‘Lefay notebook’ and his map of Narnia, and manuscripts of novels and poems by Alan Garner, Philip Pullman and Susan Cooper, many of which will be exhibited here for the first time.

On public display for the first time is the manuscript of ‘The Fall of Arthur’, a previously unknown work by Tolkien. The poem was one of several projects left uncompleted at the time of the author’s death. It is published for the first time on 23 May 2013, the day the exhibition opens to the public.

The exhibition also celebrates the authors’ links with Oxford and with the historic Bodleian Library in particular. All five authors were Oxford-educated and are considered members of the group of writers informally known as the ‘Oxford School’.

The curators

Sarah Wheale, Acting Head of Rare Books
Dr Judith Priestman, Curator of Literary Manuscripts

'The universe (which others call a library...)'

Borges’s meditation on the Library of Babel pays homage to the idea of the library as an enchanted location, the source of sorcery and arcane learning, where the act of reading is imbued with magical, transformative properties.

Surrounded by exotically-bound books, fragile parchment rolls and musty volumes written in strange languages, the boundaries between the hero and the scholar, the physical and the fantastic are dissolved in places like Lyra Belacqua’s Bodley’s Library and the Bodleian.

Mapping the Multiverse

‘I wisely started with a map, and made the story fit’ (J.R.R. Tolkien).

A map is the starting point for all journeys into the unknown, reassuring travellers of the existence of a real and accessible landscape somewhere beyond their immediate vision. Great cartographers of the imagination, like Tolkien, offer their readers entry into invented worlds whose authenticity is confirmed in the contours of a map.

The Owl Service

Alan Garner’s Carnegie medal-winning The Owl Service (1967) reimagines the Welsh legend of the flower maiden Blodeuedd which forms one of the four Branches of ‘The Mabinogion’ as preserved in the mediaeval White Book of Rhydderch and Red Book of Hergest.

The original story tells how a wizard conjures a woman made out of blossom to be the wife of Lleu Llaw Gyffes and how she is punished by being turned into an owl when she takes a lover, who is magically killed by her husband.

In Garner’s novel the tale is re-enacted by three modern teenagers after they find an old dinner service decorated with an abstract design of owls and flowers. The girl, Alison, compulsively traces and cuts out the owl patterns, thus releasing centuries’-old forces of jealousy and betrayal.

Arthur: the Once and Future King

The historical Arthur may have been a warrior chieftain of the late fifth or early sixth century, but by the Middle Ages he had acquired legendary status as the hero-king immortalised in Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur (printed 1485) with its famous tomb inscription promising that Arthur ‘ys nat dede (dead)’ but will one day return: ‘HIC IACET ARTHURUS, REX QUONDAM REXQUE FUTURUS’ (Here lies Arthur, the once and future king).

The story of Arthur and his wizard Merlin, the Knights of the Round Table, the adulterous love of Lancelot and Guinevere, the Quest for the Holy Grail and the eventual self-destruction of Camelot has inspired generations of writers, musicians and film makers, each finding different elements within the narrative that seem to speak to their own time and circumstance, ‘for herein may be seen noble chyvalrye, curtosye, humanytyé, frendlynesse, hardynesse, love, frendshyp, cowardyse, murdre, hate, vertue, and synne’ (Caxton’s preface to Malory).

Pure Northernness

In his autobiography C.S. Lewis relates how as a teenager he saw an illustration by Arthur Rackham for Wagner’s Götterdämmerung and was overcome by a sensation he described as ‘pure “Northernness”’.

Many writers have shared his vision of the far North as a transforming, otherworldly landscape that supplies an appropriately dramatic setting for the deeds of heroes, whether they appear in Norse mythology in tales of Asgard and the gods, or in the ice-bound settings of Lewis’s Narnia and Philip Pullman’s Northern Lights.

Dr Dee the Great Conjurer

John Dee (1527-1609?) was a noted mathematician, navigator, astronomer and scholar, whose research into British antiquities and Arthurian legend was used to legitimise Queen Elizabeth’s claims to territories in the New World.

He was also deeply immersed in the study of magic and hermetic philosophy, by which means he hoped to discover the divine forms (the ‘pure verities’) which underlie the visible world.

Knowledge of these forms, he believed, would equip mankind with a perfect understanding of nature, which in turn would enable humanity to revert to a prelapsarian state of unity and bliss. He believed that this might be achieved by communing with angels who speak the uncorrupted first language of the Creation, in which God made the world and Adam named it.

From 1532-9, with the help of the medium Edward Kelley, he entered into a series of ‘spiritual conferences’ with angels, in the course of which the celestial Enochian alphabet was dictated and then used to record their conversations.

Dee took meticulous notes which were recovered after his death and published in 1659, during a period of renewed interest in occultism. Dee himself died in poverty and neglect aged 82, having reputedly forecast the exact date of his death.

Magical Beasts

‘Animals were the first thing that human beings drew. Not plants. Not landscapes. Not even themselves. But animals.’ (David Attenborough)

Since the first paintings of bison and deer were made deep underground in caves 30,000 years ago, we have been fascinated by the lives of the non-human inhabitants of the planet we share. Natural historians have described and classified countless species that populate the Earth.

In the same spirit of enquiry, writers like C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, Alan Garner and Philip Pullman have explored the possibility of worlds where humans are not necessarily masters of a hierarchy of creation, but where animals and birds possess magical powers and can speak, and where creatures exist that are unknown to mortal biology.

‘Animals from the abyss – old golden creatures, things with wings, pearl-eyed monsters from the deep sea, and whispering plants from long ago.’ (Diana Wynne Jones)

In the Middle Ages when few people travelled beyond their home towns and villages the world beyond was inhabited by unknown creatures, both real and imaginary. In this realm of the possible dragons and unicorns existed alongside domestic cats and tawny owls in the pages of bestiaries and illuminated manuscripts, as well as in the popular imagination. These images of exotic potential continue to fascinate, and the pages of fantasy fiction are alive with stories of dragons, phoenixes and strange hybrid beings who live beyond the boundaries of the commonplace.

Witches Abroad

‘Animals were the first thing that human beings drew. Not plants. Not landscapes. Not even themselves. But animals.’ (David Attenborough)

Since the first paintings of bison and deer were made deep underground in caves 30,000 years ago, we have been fascinated by the lives of the non-human inhabitants of the planet we share. Natural historians have described and classified countless species that populate the Earth.

In the same spirit of enquiry, writers like C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, Alan Garner and Philip Pullman have explored the possibility of worlds where humans are not necessarily masters of a hierarchy of creation, but where animals and birds possess magical powers and can speak, and where creatures exist that are unknown to mortal biology.

‘Animals from the abyss – old golden creatures, things with wings, pearl-eyed monsters from the deep sea, and whispering plants from long ago.’ (Diana Wynne Jones)

In the Middle Ages when few people travelled beyond their home towns and villages the world beyond was inhabited by unknown creatures, both real and imaginary. In this realm of the possible dragons and unicorns existed alongside domestic cats and tawny owls in the pages of bestiaries and illuminated manuscripts, as well as in the popular imagination. These images of exotic potential continue to fascinate, and the pages of fantasy fiction are alive with stories of dragons, phoenixes and strange hybrid beings who live beyond the boundaries of the commonplace.

Words of Power

‘Many a mage of great power … has spent his whole life to find out the name of one single thing – one single lost or hidden name. And still the lists are not finished’. (Ursula Le Guin)

The magical properties of language are a constantly recurring theme in the literature and legends of the world. Stories are told of the divine origin and godlike status of the word and its ability to create and destroy. Language is power, whether expressed through the medium of the 5000 languages spoken today, or in the self-constructed lexicons of John Dee and J.R.R. Tolkien, or in the use of spells to control the implacable forces that govern the universe.

The Magus

The figure of the wise-man or wiz-ard is not confined to any culture or epoch. The possessor of secret knowledge and the power to alter circumstance may be a shaman, sorcerer, magician or stage illusionist, but the iconography remains remarkably similar: a distinctive robe, an impressive head-covering and a staff or wand.

Perhaps the most famous wizard in Western culture is Merlin, popularised by Geoffrey of Monmouth in the twelfth century and reimagined eight hundred years later by J.R. R. Tolkien in the form of the Grey Pilgrim, Gandalf.

George Ripley and the Philosopher's Stone

George Ripley was an Augustinian canon and influential alchemist best known for his work The Compound of Alchymy which he dedicated to Edward IV in 1471.

Written in verse, Ripley’s treatise reveals ‘the right & perfectest meanes to make the Philosophers Stone’, the legendary substance that can turn base metals into gold and silver, and confer long life or even immortality on the possessor. Its discovery was the supreme object of alchemy and the popularity of Ripley’s writings contributed to the revival of alchemical learning in England, particularly in the seventeenth century in the years following the Civil War.

The ‘Ripley scrolls’ were copied for the most part in the 16th and early 17th centuries by various artists from a now lost original version (or versions). The dense imagery of the alchemical emblems derives from Ripley’s poem and illustrates the various processes involved in the preparation of the philosopher’s stone.

Twenty-three of these scrolls are now known to exist. The Bodleian houses five of them; others are held in various institutions in Britain, America and France. A striking figure drawn at the end of two of the Bodleian scrolls is said to be George Ripley himself, carrying his distinctively-shod horseshoe staff.

Alchemy was a branch of esoteric study and practical craft whose primary goal was the transformation of physical substances from a state of imperfect temporal existence to one of spiritual perfection. Through the use of various chemical and magical processes, alchemists attempted to prepare a universal elixir, the philosopher’s stone, which had the power to transmute base metal into gold and confer longevity, immortality and ultimately redemption on the possessor.

Divination: Unfogging the Future

Crystal balls, tea leaves, animal entrails, heavenly bodies, human palms, bones and yarrow stalks are just a few of the objects that have been minutely scrutinised by oracles and supplicants alike in the hope of predicting what the future holds in store. Whether interpreted by a Sibyl in a cave, a fortune-teller in a fairground tent, or by an on-line astrologer on a horoscope site, the desire to have foreknowledge of events appears to be a universal one, as important to modern-day citizens as it was to mediaeval kings.