Tolkien Archive and Exhibition at Bodleian (Part 2)

So you've mentioned the exhibition and perhaps we could talk a bit about that. Could you just say how the how the idea originated to have this exhibition on Tolkien? Yeah, it originally started as an idea for a Hobbit exhibition to focus purely on The Hobbit. And this was came up in 2012. And that might ring a bell because that was when Peter Jackson's films were in production. The Hobbit films were supposed to be two films and then became three at some stage.

And we were thinking about this going to be another representation on film of Tolkien's works and wouldn't be nice to present people with Tolkien's vision of Middle-earth and Tolkien's vision of The Hobbit, rather than just as a sort of counterbalance to Peter Jackson's vision. And so that's how it started. And we were thinking about obviously we don't have the manuscripts of The Hobbit, but we were thinking about a showcase of the illustrations, which amongst.

Some of the best that Tolkien created his illustrations of The Hobbit and perhaps an exhibition that would tour around the U.K. going to lots of regional centres and reaching out to communities that don't have the opportunity to go to London to see major exhibitions. So this was the initial idea. And you know what it's like in meetings around a table. And and somebody said, well, why are we just doing The Hobbit?

We've got this amazing Tolkien collection here. And then it was like a light bulb moment. It's like, why are we why are we limiting ourselves in this way? You know, we could do a huge Tolkien exhibition and we hadn't done one since 1992. And it was the last major Tolkien exhibition at the podium. So we're talking about 20 years later, you're reaching out to a whole different audience. We've had the films that these Jackson films intervening in that time.

And so then the head of exhibitions at the Bodleian said to me, what would you do if you could do anything with the exhibition? You know, what would you do with it? Well, easy. Bring them some of the manuscript material back from market. Bring some of that in at the Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit, the written material back here, and showcase it with the drawings and the maps and the letters and that we've got here to just draw the whole collection together again.

And that's what I really wanted to do. And that's what happened eventually with the with the help of financial help and trust, with the, you know, the help of Marquette University being willing to facilitate that as well. Yeah. And so that's the route we went down. So it was called the maker of Middle-earth.

Did you have a narrative? I mean, I've never put an exhibition together, but I could imagine, faced with this sort of wonderful collection of material, plus whatever we could get from Marquette, I'd be like a child in a sweet shop. But did you have a narrative in mind thinking, well, I've got this amount of space, I've got these many cases. This is the story we want to tell? Yeah, it was very much left to me, but there was some debate about which space we were going to use.

So there was the idea for it to go initially into ST LEE gallery at the Weston Library. So if you think back to the days, 2012 is when we first started thinking about it and started planning at that point and the Weston Library was had been gutted and was just like a shell and was being rebuilt. And we'd been promised all sorts of new galleries and new spaces. But that wasn't an actual reality at that stage.

So we kind of work into something that's going to be a reality in the future, which which together made it quite interesting. And and previous to the Weston, we had quite a small exhibition room in the old school quad in library. And so we knew that they were going to be bigger spaces. There was going to be a permanent treasures gallery in the Weston Library and to showcase just all the wonderful treasures that we hold at the Bodleian.

And there was going to be a changing exhibition in the ST LEE gallery. So for Tolkien initially was to go in the ST LEE gallery and then there was talk of it taking over both and galleries at once, which I was like, oh God, that would be fantastic. Just like I would like double the space. And so I started planning for that. And then there was lots of logistical problems around that.

And then it was. It turned around again and he had to go just in one gallery, so there's a kind of series of ups and downs of how much material I was going to have to have and how much space is going to be available. So in terms of the overall concept, I didn't find that hard at all. I mean, I have worked with the Tolkien archive since 2003, so I know the collection really well.

And it was obvious to me that I wanted to centre on and his writings on Middle-earth say The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings and the Silmarillion. And then around that, I was really keen to get in biographical elements of Tolkien's life so that we could just see him as a figure in the round and we could see him not just as an author, but, you know, as an academic, Oxford, as it as just a real person, a friend, a father, a husband.

And so that was important to me to give a greater impression of who Tolkien was. And that said the material filled the cases themselves. Really. And I wanted to have Fans' reactions to Tolkien in one of the cases, in fact, I thought that that was going to be the final case in the room is going to be the readers impressions. And and this is because we've got a large number of fan mail items, the letters that were written to Tolkien from his fans.

We've got boxes and boxes in the archive and this material has never been available to researchers and hasn't been published. And over the years I've been working on the Tolkien archive and cataloguing it. I'd come across some fascinating letters like Terry Pratchett. I wondered if this is the Terry Pratchett from Beaconsfield, a bit of research letters like, yeah, definitely.

He wrote a fan letters, a 19 year old Tolkien and Joni Mitchell wrote to him and, you know, asked if they could name their recording company, the characters from Lord of the Rings. And and it's been very exciting over the years to to find these sort of gems and not to be able to share them. So I was really keen to get the reader's response. That was one of the first actually you got me that was just there. And so an exhibition is a very fluid process to be involved in and quite late on.

And the development, the whole room got turned around, the exit and entrance got turned around, which is a bit of a nightmare. And some people did pick up on that at some visitors exhibitions that they couldn't figure out the route around the room. And I have to confess that it didn't really run well is because we'd reversed it. And the reason for that was that we wanted to collaborate with muralists who do sound and light installations.

And we'd seen their work in Oxford was really keen to incorporate that in some way into the exhibition. And so they needed a dark, enclosed space to work the projections. And so the only space that we felt that we could use in collaboration with them was what we called the transept. And it's a corridor between the two exhibition rooms. And so we wanted visitors to walk down that corridor across maps of Middle-earth towards the and the doors during at the end and then into.

But that that had always been the exit to the room. Right. And so some of the cases there, all different shapes and sizes within the exhibition room and they're immoveable, fixed. So we just had to work within that, we desperately wanted people to walk through that transept and be immersed in this mural projections before they entered the exhibition. And for that, we had to sacrifice some of the logic of when you entered the room that you didn't it didn't follow round so easily,

the room around the room. And so the graphic designer helped hugely with that. So she put a Smaug dragon on the floor. So she came in. You kind of turned towards that. And we hoped that people would then go to the fan mail. And that made as much sense to put that first, put it last, actually, and to see and. What did people think of Tolkien who was doing what? How did they respond to him and to line that case with his works as well?

His published works. And it did leave people looking around the room. And where do I go next? So in a sense, it didn't matter which case she went to. And there was a biographical case in the centre of the room which told you something about his early life and student days, but it wasn't really chronological- sort of thematic. There's the extraordinary photo of him in Exeter College. And you either ring or block it out, all the ones who didn't come back from the First World War was very moving.

Yeah, there was a kind of tussle with a graphic designer over whether the men, the boys who had died in the war should be ghosted out or whether it was the people who survived it. I wanted it to be the people who died who were then only spread out the design and wanted it to be the other way around. But yeah, it's very visually striking. You see, it's lovely matriculation photo and they do look very young.

And despite all wearing suits and ties in 1911 and then to see how that was decimated by the First World War. And it's just it's very visual and it has had a great impact, I think, on people who came to the exhibition.

So apart from the feedback that some people have got a bit confused, it was an extraordinary success. I mean, I remember sitting in queues, you know, and the posters were up. And every time I came into the hall of people queuing. Have you got any idea the numbers that just attended the exhibition? Yeah, yeah. We had a hundred and thirty eight thousand visitors in 21 weeks. We'd never had numbers like that for any Bodleian exhibition.

I mean, it's just the whole that all the statistics around the exhibition or, you know, highest, the best or the biggest ever. The book to accompany Maker of Middle Earth was the biggest we'd ever publish. To date is the most successful. It's been translated into five different languages now.

And you know that the communications team that worked really hard on promoting the exhibition and they'd never had so many pieces of coverage in both UK and international news and the shop, retail sales of the product range outstripped anything they'd ever done and caused almost a bit of a meltdown with the retail staff because they just couldn't cope with the numbers who would come in and the number of sales that were coming in

online as well that they were having to package up and send out across the world. And, you know, we desperately kind of needed to take on more stuff in the shop as the exhibition went on and. I say that was that was really difficult for the retail staff to cope pretty well, but it was an amazing range that they'd created and it was the first time that we'd been able to sell Tolkien images of Tolkien's drawings on objects and items that weren't on paper.

So in the past, we'd always had an agreement with the interest that we could use those images on paper products. So a poster or a postcard or a greeting card. And and they very generously gave us the rights to use those and put the proceeds to benefit the library. But for the exhibition, we wanted a much bigger range of items than people expect when they go to any big exhibition show how to get the tea towel or the fridge magnet.

And so there was a lot of hard work went into that with the licence with Tolkien's estate and with their family support. And out of this Bodleian retail manager just put together this beautiful range, you know, with everything from jewellery to mugs. Yeah. Just to point out for anyone listening, you can still go on the shop. Bodleian site. It's still being sold.

It is is a beautiful range. Yeah. The catalogue you mentioned, which in itself is an absolutely joyous production because in there's all kinds of illustrations in there some of which you couldn't include in the exhibition. So in that it's an invaluable book. But also you selected a lot of essays by Tolkien scholars. So that must have required quite a bit of work on your part.

Yeah, I'm certainly a busy few years and the exhibition and the book together had to work in tandem because the book was an exhibition catalogue, which means that we wanted to show an image of every item in the exhibition and have a text about that. So we had to follow closely very closely and the exhibition planning and production. But obviously I was doing everything in the book and the exhibition. It took five years to plan the exhibition and one year of that was writing the book.

And the difficulty was keeping in mind the difference between an exhibition and a book. It sounds maybe a bit odd. It's obvious, though, that two completely different things. But an exhibition is an experience. It's a show. It's you know, you've got to bear in mind that people just walk round, they're tired. They can only concentrate, you know, for a certain amount of time. You've got to keep the captions very short. And otherwise, people just cannot engage with everything in the room.

A book, you've got much more space in there, you know, limited and you can expand and you've got a different audience. And so it was just trying to because the two are very closely meshed in my mind. It was just trying to keep a little bit of a distinction between what the exhibition is going to be and what the outcome is going to be. And we really have an amazing exhibitions team in the building and quite small team.

You see, I think there's five of them. And I worked really closely with head of exhibitions. So every item I selected to go into the exhibition and we would have a session where we laid out the case and on the table all the items that were going to go in the case. And then we would have a discussion. You say, well, why? Why do you want this item? You know, what does this say? You know, what is this going to add to it? Or and, you know, maybe we need more items in that case.

And so it's quite funny. When we started at the very outset of the exhibition and the team said to me, you can only have between 60 and 70 items in the exhibition room because otherwise it's just crowded. It's not really a big room and the cases get crowded and people can't see.

And I thought, no, I don't think so, because the difference between Tolkien and maybe other exhibitions that we've put on here is that we would often have a lot of books and books open out and take a lot of room in an exhibition case. But Tolkien worked on a very small scale. So even items which you might even I imagine them to be quite big in my mind, like The Hobbit dust jacket is actually quite a small item.

And those Hobbit watercolour illustrations like Smaug and the Eagles, they're only a small pieces of paper. And so as we went along, I pushed and pushed to add A number of items and we got up to 220 items and 200 books, I mean, exhibitions absolutely know what they're doing and how to lay out. Looks so beautiful. But even they realise that that, OK, it's all single sheets of paper and it's all quite small.

And so when we came to look at the the Doodles newspaper, which proved to be really popular section, that took me by surprise actually in the comments afterwards in the Visitor books, people loved those newspaper doodles. I'm still wondering why and follow up on their, you know, their Elvish designs or. Yeah, yeah. But you think, well, the most beautiful artwork like The Hobbit watercolours.

But there was something about the immediacy of those doodles that people everybody's doodle as well themselves, haven't they, that they've been in the boring lesson or boring faculty meeting and they doodle something and they thought, gosh, even, you know, Tolkien was doing this and then he created something more from him. Maybe it was that anyway, when we were selecting items for that case, we realised we can get more and more.

So in the end, the book did get a little bit out of sync with the exhibition because the book has to be finished and go off to the publisher to be printed,

you know, almost nine months in advance. And during that time, we're still adding material to the exhibition. So there was more in the exhibition than you see in the book, because even the week that we were installed in the exhibition, which is a really hectic time, they would say, oh, I think we could have more fun mail items, like in the stack, like rummaging through boxes and pulling stuff out and just, yeah, just arrange in the case.

It was similar with the doodles as well. We realised we could get more in there. So really, it's a really exciting time and exhibitions are like that all the time and it builds up, builds up. So this is like huge crescendo where they're trying to put everything into the case and have it look beautiful before opening day. You mentioned the feedback. Was there anything that sort of leapt out?

I mean, the bit about the doodles and anything else that leapt out that you just remember that for the future? Yeah. The thing that took us all by surprise, I think, was the emotional response to the exhibition. And that really comes out in the visitor books. So we always lay out a Visitor notebook at the end of the exhibition at the exit, and we usually fill about four books.

So they were filling one every week for Tolkien. So we got 20 visitor books full of comments and there's a marked section for you to fill in. It has like six or seven lines and generally people just say wonderful, you know, lovely. But Tolkien, they just fill these sections up. You know, they had stories about, you know, memories of their father reading it to them, of how it helped them through difficult times in their lives.

You know, how they'd waited all their life to see it was just it was really overwhelming to see those comments and to see the connexion that people felt with with Tolkien's work, how important it was to them and and and, yeah, how how moved they felt by the exhibition. And that was actually a comment that Tolkien's daughter, Priscilla, said to me when she came out. She came to visit a number of times just incognito and and because she lives in Oxford and was able to come in and wander around.

And she had a free pass, obviously, to get into the exhibition whenever she wanted to. And she said she kind of felt overwhelmed by seeing the material there and incredibly moved by it because, of course, it's material that it came to the Bodleian decades ago. It was he's he's not seen it. And we had very personal items on display from family photographs to objects that the family members.

And so she said initially she came and on the first couple of visits have brought people with her friends and and people who she wanted to show around the exhibition, but then realised that she actually needed to come on her own and just, you know, take it, take everything in just being strong and emotional for you can imagine what it must be like to see this contribution. Will all these memories of your father's life and your childhood and growing up.

But then then the visitors book. The impact there is that on so many people, yeah, it was extraordinary. Yeah, and I think that was probably the the best thing about it for me was just seeing the joy that people got from the exhibition. So I'm based in the same building in the Weston Library and and my office. I can and come out of my office into the corridor and I can look down into the space that's Blackwells hall and which is sort of the entry space to the exhibition.

And just to see the buzz down there, to see people, you know, excited, getting tickets, queuing up and then coming out and talking about it or just to hop into the exhibition room at any point during its run. And just to hear the comments. It was yeah, it was really, really lovely and a busy time for me. Back to that comment at the beginning of this interview. You mentioned the girl you were talking to said about you can find messages in the book for getting you through.

Yes, they are books that a lot of people emotionally associate with for all kinds of reasons. But the other thing was, it wasn't just an exhibition that was fantastic.

There was all this raft of events around them. I remember there were talks. And so were you involved in, in thinking about the scheduling or the types of things we should be putting in some of it, I wasn't to be honest, I was so busy with the book and the exhibition that I didn't have a lot of time that I could devote to the outreach. And just looking back now, I have no idea how we managed to put on so much.

And we could you know, you think we could have done so much more, but we just don't have the staff and we didn't have the staff then. So we have one person at the time who was the education officer who is responsible for and school groups and outreach. And she already had quite a full programme, regardless of the Tolkien exhibition. But she was responsible for putting on all the activities associated with the library late. And so in the library was an event that we put on about once a term.

And there was an evening event in Blackwells hall for the public. Lots of different activities happening in the space and usually related to an exhibition. And the aim of that like relates is to bring in a different kind of audience to the library, to bring in a younger audience, to bring in people who've who've never come to the podium of the university before. So Tolkien was very successful, like Relate.

They had 400 people that for a couple of hours in the evening and put on all sorts of amazing events. That's our educational process, from like the real riders of Rohan or Anglo Saxon actors and to people help in public create and bookmarks each and Elvish script and tell them, well, we had an artist I've got to is helping people create their own illustrations. And there was a living library of academics.

And so you could go over and select an academic to chat to with an interest in and in talking a real personal engagement with an expert. And there's many talks. Yeah. Yeah. And that was one of those that was also repeated in September for the Oxford Open Doors weekend, which is like the Heritage Weekend. And then we got in one day in September. We got 5000 people into hall. And you were part of that Stuart as well, delivering a talk. And I wasn't involved in setting the up.

And I wasn't and I wasn't involved in the open doors day, but I just went along sort of incognito and and took part in some of the events. And so I was sitting at an arts table and I was creating a badge with a Silmarillion sort of heraldic crest on it. And I was chatting to the lady next to me and she was getting all emotional about the exhibition. She had to come from America and it was so important to her.

And I said, Oh, I'm a curator. And she just couldn't speak. She was I think she was just overwrought. You. Oh, my God. And it was like, oh, like maybe I've said the wrong thing now because it is sort of a combination of that. And she just she just didn't know what to say. But it's just yeah.

It was just amazing to see people enjoying it. And also for me to be able to share all these highlights of the collections, like I mentioned with fanmail, and to share the artwork, which is usually not available even to. Researchers and just to put on all the highlights and to to share, if he couldn't see the enjoyment from his his fans and readers and yeah,

that was the best thing about it for me. And for anyone listening that a lot of the talks were recorded on there on the Bodley podcast page. So you can go and see them. Yeah, but yeah, just just to finish on it. I remember there was the launch event and you were talking about people coming from, you know, corners of the earth to see this exhibition because it's international and a preopening in the King's arms.

There are all these Tolkien scholars and then we have that lovely meal in the end in the divinity school. I think it was I can't quite remember. And there was the lightning storm and it was like the Notion Club papers. Yeah, one was. Yeah, it was a wonderful evening.

And in terms of like that, the visitor numbers, we because it was the first ticketed event exhibition that we ever put on because I personally had concerns of huge queues everywhere. And I didn't want people to have to queue around the block for two hours to get in to see the exhibition. I really I was really against that. And so after so many meetings, can't tell you had so many months and we decided to go down the route of ticketing.

Now, it was free, but in order to set up a ticketing system and to make it work, we had to charge £1 a sort of booking fee. And to make to make that work, it was hugely expensive, actually. And so it gave you a time ticket and it sort of it meant that there wasn't a build-Up of queues, but it also meant that we could capture some data on the visitors, because when you booked your ticket, you put down some details like your postcode and things like that.

So we were able to see that 20 percent of the visitors came from overseas. And we could also see that I think about 50 percent of our visitors came from Oxford and Oxfordshire, and that was actually really important to us was to to use this exhibition and the appeal of Tolkien to sort of reach out beyond the usual clientele, if you like, that would come to Bodleian exhibitions or Bodleian talks about an events.

And typically these are older people, or if they had an association with the university, they're the current staff and former staff or and and we really we want to get rid of those people, but we really want to reach out beyond. And we thought Tolkien is the exhibition where we can do this. And so we did have additional marketing to reach out to groups in Oxford and to reach people who never come into the public library and never had anything to do with the university,

thinks that maybe that that was up to them. The Weston Library wasn't there for them. And I'm just at these range of events like the like really and open doors that Tolkien pub quiz and to bring in people into the space. And I think 70 percent of people who came to the exhibition had never been in the audience before. So we really. Yeah, we nailed it. Yeah, absolutely.

And then, of course, it went abroad somewhere. Did you have much involvement in the exhibition in the States or in Paris? Well, the states was very closely tied to the exhibition at the Morgan Library in New York, was very closely tied to our exhibition. So in fact, they took a subset of our exhibition. They took about half the items. And so that curator there selected those items. I wasn't involved in that.

And they configured them for their space and that it was just a subset of our exhibition. And so they were able to also take the book and the retail product range because that would work as well for them. And that was hugely popular in America. And the exhibition in Paris at the Nationale was completely different. Ours was a maker of Middle Earth. It wasn't, and the Oxford exhibition at all. And so they came up with a completely new concept from scratch.

And so I just facilitated that in the background for both exhibitions I would be involved in and supplying copyright information, making sure the images were supplied. And the Paris I was involved in the packing and the installation. So I went over there with and with the exhibitions team and oversaw the installation and which is quite exciting. But yeah, it was very much a background role that I would be doing from the podium. So it made me quite busy.

But I wasn't involved in the curatorial decisions and I said, well, I got to the Paris limit and get to the States when I had a different feel. And it was bigger, of course, but it was then touching on different things. So if you you know, I have next to your catalogue, the catalogue from the music rationale and the two wonderful collections going to predictions for Tolkan. Material, I'm hoping they'll publish their catalogue in English. Yes, yes.

They don't have plans to yet, but that would be great, I think. Yeah. So presumably with the success another couple of years, we're going to rerun the exhibition. Yeah, yeah. I think yeah. This maybe people in within the body and I think we've done enough talking now and I know say, you know, the collection itself has to be sort of safeguarded and protected from too much exposure. So it's had quite a lot of exposure with the similar items or a subset of the same items.

Go into New York for quite a major exhibition and then a lot of the same items going to Paris. Yeah. And so now we have to be quite careful. It's almost like we've used up quite a big allocation of display time and, you know, the exposure to light and and a lot of handling goes on the exhibitions with the preparation and sending them. And so, yeah, I'm quite happy to see it resting safely in the strongroom. Well, I'm conscious of time and it's been fantastic. Just a couple more questions.

I mean, you talked about the fact that it is a living archive in the sense that it is growing. More material comes in every now and then or you occasionally acquire material and the demands on your time and questions continue. Are you are you seeing any surge? And in terms of the Amazon series that's going to be coming up, are you getting any questions from the film company or whatever related to the collection?

No, no, I've never had any involvement with the film companies, either Newline or the Amazon production. Um, so, yeah, that that that totally working without the and the archival material, their own vision. And I haven't seen any increase in enquiries, say most of the enquiries I get tend to be from academic researchers who already know that they won't need to use the items that we have for the body and library. Yeah, but perhaps as that TV series appears.

Erm I get more enquiries about the second age material. Yeah. Did Peter Jackson come to the exhibition? Not that I know of is quite recognisable as well, isn't he? Well, he is, but he'd fit in in Oxford. OK, so the final question, and I think I did warn you that this is the unfair desert island disk. If there was a fire or something, what item would you save from the Tolkien archive? Do you have a particular. Yeah. So difficult, isn't it? The whole archive as a whole, every item.

That adds something more to your knowledge of Tolkien and his work. And I have to say just personally, totally personal choices that I would and I would grab there. And the gardensof the Merkings Palace, the watercolour that he painted for Roverandum, the Children's story. And I just yeah, I absolutely love that. I could I could have that on my wall. I could look at it every day. Yeah, that's what that's my favourite item. Well, I don't know the archives as well as you.

I remember looking through it and finding one of the bits of the Book of Mazarbul and just thinking and I think I've mentioned this before, it was so strange because I thought, oh, my God, this is the real manuscript. This is the one that was in Moria and then I turned it over and it was lined like a school exercise book. Yeah, yeah. That is a very flimsy item on paper. But there was secondary belief there for a moment. Yeah. Really. Yes. Well thank you very much.

Has been absolutely amazing. And I'm really grateful for your time. You're welcome.