Oxford, 6/1/08

Don June 6th, 2008

The group today took a jaunt back into an even more distant past than the one that surrounds us daily here in Oxford: we drove out to the Roman baths in Bath, stopping at Stonehenge on the way.

One thinks of Legolas meeting Fangorn and commenting, “Now this makes even me feel young!”

No one even knows who built Stonehenge, which goes back to 3,000 BC–someone who was here before the Celts conquered by first the Romans and then the Saxons in the Christian era–and no one really knows how, and no one is even quite sure why. It is a kind of solar calendar to mark the summer solstice, but no one knows exactly how that figured into the religion of those people, whose thoughts and the tongue they framed them in are utterly lost to us. The ridges surrounding the monument in the Salisbury Plain are all topped with burial mounds: Tolkien’s Barrow Downs
incarnated right before our eyes. But even I, who go back to the Third Age of Middle Earth, could shed no light on the mystery. For the North Kingdom of Arnor built its barrows and Arvedui Last King fell even before this time, a part of your prehistory I seem to have slept through.

The pavements, hot springs, monuments, and pools used by the Romans occupying Britain between the first and
fourth centuries AD gave us a connection to an ancient people we can actually remember, the direct ancestors in unbroken line of our own civilization. And Chaucer’s Wife of Bath no doubt rested her weary old bones in those same springs when she got back from her pilgrimage to Canterbury. But that was a paltry 600 years ago–a mere blink of the eye of Father Time. So what does that make the three weeks we have left here?  I leave the calculations to the mathematically inclined, and remain your humble servant, reporting

From the Dreaming Spires,

Gandalf

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