Ghost Tours

As I was walking around Oxford today, I came across a sign advertising Ghost Tours of Oxford.  While personally, I don't believe in ghosts, I do have a sense that Oxford is haunted.  Let me explain.  Ghosts, as in phantasms of dead people, are merely projections of the imaginations of the living.  To be haunted, however, is to say that now dead people made a mark upon the place that we can still see today.

I can walk out of the flat and around a corner and have fish and chips in the pub where Lewis and Tolkien gathered with friends to share an ale and discuss their writings.  They will not magically appear there and speak words of "Inkling" wisdom, but I can sit where they sat and have a bit of inspiration knowing that this was the place where true geniuses sharpened each other.

And in that sense Oxford is a very haunted place.  Centuries of people both known to history and unknown have called this place home and left their mark upon it.  Whether in the historic buildings, the runs of the roads, the unevenness of  the sidewalk--all of it reminds me that someone was here before me and that they have left behind something of their dreams, joys, hopes and frustrations.  Their choices and lives some made in the distant past continue to effect the people who live here today.  What makes Oxford Oxford is not today's population, but the parade of people who founded, built, worked, lived and died here.

There is on the internet a photo tour of all the places that Tolkien lived and frequented.  It is a journey I am going to make while I am here.  They are mostly unassuming and of little note--none are on the list of the must see places here.  But I am going to see them because as I do I may catch a glimpse if only fleeting of what made Tolkien Tolkien.

Ghosts no.  But this place is definitely haunted.