Tolkien Country

I thought it was time to finally visit universities even more famous than the U of A! So we went to Oxford. Things are arranged quite differently in England. Oxford actually consists of lots of different colleges. You can go in and visit many of them, but the only one I wanted to tour was Merton--which is where J.R.R. Tolkien was a professor. Afterwards I took a long walk around the canal, thinking, hmm, this is where he could have gotten the idea for Rivendell......

Who wouldn't get great ideas walking around such a beautiful place? But of course, I was lucky enough to be there on a sunny day, so everything seemed possible!

Elves would be here, of course, lurking behind the trees. And dwarves just around the corner. Of course, J.R.R. was doing all this thinking and writing in his "spare" time....