This weekend, 21 George Mason University undergraduate and graduate students, plus two faculty directors, will go to Oxford University for three weeks of summer study arranged by GMU’s Center for Global Education.
This weekly column will look at lists of books kids are reading in various categories, including grade level, book genre and data from booksellers. The books below, written between 1937 and 1954, were among the works read aloud at The Eagle & Child pub in Oxford, England. All are appropriate for ages 10 to adult.
Books of “high fantasy” by the Inklings
The Chronicles of Narnia by
C.S. Lewis
1. The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe
2. Prince Caspian: The Return to Narnia
3. The Voyage of the Dawn Treader
4. The Silver Chair
5. The Horse and His Boy
6. The Magician’s Nephew
7. The Last Battle
Tales from Middle-Earth by
J.R.R. Tolkien
1. The Hobbit
2. The Lord of the Rings Trilogy (The Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers, The Return of the King)
My husband and I have participated in four such programs, and I am struck each time by how disconnected all the mental preparation is from the experience itself. Before classes, students fret about what to wear, what books to bring, what the weather will be like. They make sure their electronics can be adapted to the standard 230V in England, and that they will have Internet access.
“Will there be a gym?” they ask, and “What sort of formal dress is required in hall?” (“In hall” refers to the Harry Potter experience of dining each evening in medieval dining halls.) All the above questions are easy to answer — except the one about the weather.
Temperatures in previous summers have ranged from the 50s to the 90s, and I don’t expect they will be any more predictable this time.
The questions that never surface are the ones about the intellectual and cultural transformations that may take place. Students will initially be impressed by the architecture. No university in the United States has buildings that date to the Middle Ages — and the stone spires that signified an aspiration to the divine hundreds of years ago continue to inspire modern students, much as they did their medieval counterparts.
The intellectual history of the spot is as formidable as the architecture. Oxford has produced 57 Nobel Prize winners; by contrast, at GMU we are proud to have two! Oxford graduates include hundreds of kings, politicians and writers — among them Oscar Wilde, Adam Smith, John Locke, Lewis Carroll and Albert Einstein. But what will seize my students’ imaginations most will be the Inklings.
Long before J.K. Rowling scribbled her outline for the Harry Potter saga on a café napkin, a literary group, self-titled “Inklings,” met at a local Oxford pub, The Eagle & Child, to encourage one another’s writing. J.R.R. Tolkien, author of “The Hobbit” and The Lord of the Rings trilogy, and C.S. Lewis, author of “The Chronicles of Narnia,” were the most prominent of those who read aloud and discussed their works of “high fantasy.”
The Tolkien epics developed a huge following during the 1950s and were responsible for a cultural genre that has only gained in popularity since that time. Lewis’ “Narnia” series, most particularly “The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe,” has also been widely read and turned into film versions. The men sitting around that corner table, reading aloud, changed the future of children’s (and adult) literature.
For my students there may be no future-altering moments in The Eagle & Child, but they can have a drink at the same table where fantasy history took place, and may have their own transcendent moments listening to Oxford professors speak on the fields that fascinate them. My daughter tells me that her two summers at Cambridge University changed her perspective on scholarship and inspired the theme for her graduating art exhibition, and I hope these GMU students will find themselves similarly transformed this July.
Erica Jacobs, whose column appears Wednesday, teaches at George Mason University. E-mail her at [email protected].
