Northmoor Road is a residential street in North Oxford, England. [2]
Northmoor Road is a residential street in North Oxford, England. [2]
Northmoor Road runs north-south, parallel to and east of the Banbury Road. At the northern end is a junction with Belbroughton Road and to the south is a junction with Bardwell Road, location of the Dragon School. Linton Road crosses the road east-west about halfway along.
St Andrew's Church, [1] established in 1907, is on the southeast corner of the junction with Linton Road. Just to the north is Northmoor Place, a row of newer terrace houses. Most of the houses in Northmoor Road are substantial detached residences, built between 1899 and 1930. [2] Many of the earliest houses at the southern end were designed by Harry Wilkinson Moore (1850–1915). [3]
Perhaps the most famous resident of Northmoor Road was the Oxford academic and author J. R. R. Tolkien. [4] He lived at No. 22 in 1926–30 and then a larger house at No. 20 in 1930–47. Tolkien wrote The Hobbit and most of The Lord of the Rings while living at No. 20. [5] [6] There is now a blue plaque on the house and it has been Grade II listed (Entry Number: 1391361) since 2004. [7] Tolkien later lived at Sandfield Road in Headington. According to a 2019 report, much of No. 20's interior remains "largely unaltered" since the 1940s. [8] [9]
Another resident was Sir Martin Wood, who in 1959 set up his company, Oxford Instruments, in his garden shed at his house in Northmoor Road. [10] Oxford Instruments, the first significant spin-out company from the University of Oxford, made the first superconducting magnets for MRI scanners and became a leader in medical technology. Later, in the 1980s, Wood founded the Northmoor Trust, aimed at promoting nature conservation at Little Wittenham and Wittenham Clumps in the Oxfordshire countryside south of Oxford. From 1994 to 2014, Michael O'Regan, OBE, and his wife Jane, lived at No. 6 Northmoor Road. O’Regan was co-founder of Research Machines, a company that supplies computer hardware and software for the educational market. In 1998, O'Regan founded the Hamilton Trust, [11] a charity that provides resources for teachers.
The German Indologist and philologist Rudolf Hoernlé lived for several years at No. 8 Northmoor Road, dying there (during the Spanish flu pandemic) in 1918. [12] Charles Firth (1857–1936), Professor of History at the University of Oxford, lived at No. 2, a distinctive house with a two-storey bow-front, designed by E. W. Allfrey in 1903–8. [2] [13] The house is in the Queen Anne style. [3] The Oxford University historian of science, Professor Margaret Gowing, CBE (1921–1998), lived in Northmoor Place towards the end of her life. [14] Michael Maclagan, Fellow and Tutor in Modern History at Trinity College, herald, and Lord Mayor of Oxford 1970–71, lived for many years at No. 20, Tolkien's former home. The diplomat Sir Julian Bullard (1928–2006) lived in Northmoor Road during his retirement. [15]
Three Nobel Prizewinners are associated with Northmoor Road. The eminent Austrian quantum physicist Erwin Schrödinger and his wife Anny lived there from 1933 to 1936. [16] Schrödinger previously held a Professorship at the Friedrich Wilhelm University in Berlin. He was not Jewish but was alarmed by the rise of anti-Semitism and accepted the offer of a Fellowship at Magdalen College Oxford to escape from Nazi Germany. Initially, they stayed at No. 12 Northmoor Road, and it was there that Schrödinger learned that he had been awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics, jointly with Paul Dirac from Cambridge. Early in 1934 the Schrödingers moved into No. 24, two doors from the Tolkiens, where they lived until Schrödinger left in 1936 to take up a Professorship at the University of Graz, Austria.
In 1935, while he was living at No 24, Schrödinger wrote his famous "Schrödinger's cat" paper, [17] criticising the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics, which proposed that the exact state of a single atom was indeterminate until observed. Schrödinger's thought experiment imagined a cat in a steel box, together with a small sample of some radioactive material in which there was a 50% chance that, in any hour, one atom would decay and emit radioactivity. Any release of radioactivity, detected by a Geiger counter, would trigger a device that would cause a hammer to shatter a glass vial containing prussic acid, hence killing the cat. Schrödinger argued that, according to the Copenhagen Interpretation, the cat would be both alive and dead until someone opened the box after an hour to take a look.
Schrödinger's popular science book What is Life? [18] influenced Francis Crick and James Watson, winners of the Nobel Prize for discovery of the structure of DNA, both of whom are also linked with Northmoor Road. Watson and his wife Liz owned an apartment at No. 19 for some time after he held the Newton-Abraham Visiting Professorship at Lincoln College, Oxford, in 1994.
Erwin Rudolf Josef Alexander Schrödinger, sometimes written as Schroedinger or Schrodinger, was a Nobel Prize–winning Austrian and naturalized Irish physicist who developed fundamental results in quantum theory. In particular, he is recognized for postulating the Schrödinger equation, an equation that provides a way to calculate the wave function of a system and how it changes dynamically in time. He coined the term "quantum entanglement", and was the earliest to discuss it, doing so in 1932.
John Ronald Reuel Tolkien was an English writer and philologist. He was the author of the high fantasy works The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.
Smaug is a dragon and the main antagonist in J. R. R. Tolkien's 1937 novel The Hobbit, his treasure and the mountain he lives in being the goal of the quest. Powerful and fearsome, he invaded the Dwarf kingdom of Erebor 171 years prior to the events described in the novel. A group of thirteen dwarves mounted a quest to take the kingdom back, aided by the wizard Gandalf and the hobbit Bilbo Baggins. In The Hobbit, Thorin describes Smaug as "a most specially greedy, strong and wicked worm".
Hobbits are a fictional race of people in the novels of J. R. R. Tolkien. About half average human height, Tolkien presented Hobbits as a variety of humanity, or close relatives thereof. Occasionally known as halflings in Tolkien's writings, they live barefooted, and traditionally dwell in homely underground houses which have windows, built into the sides of hills, though others live in houses. Their feet have naturally tough leathery soles and are covered on top with curly hair.
Bag End is the underground dwelling of the Hobbits Bilbo and Frodo Baggins in J. R. R. Tolkien's fantasy novels The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. From there, both Bilbo and Frodo set out on their adventures, and both return there, for a while. As such, Bag End represents the familiar, safe, comfortable place which is the antithesis of the dangerous places that they visit. It forms one end of the main story arcs in the novels, and since the Hobbits return there, it also forms an end point in the story circle in each case.
Thomas Alan Shippey is a British medievalist, a retired scholar of Middle and Old English literature as well as of modern fantasy and science fiction. He is considered one of the world's leading academic experts on the works of J. R. R. Tolkien about whom he has written several books and many scholarly papers. His book The Road to Middle-Earth has been called "the single best thing written on Tolkien".
"The Man in the Moon Stayed Up Too Late" is J. R. R. Tolkien's imagined original song behind the nursery rhyme "Hey Diddle Diddle ", invented by back-formation. It was first published in Yorkshire Poetry magazine in 1923, and was reused in extended form in the 1954–55 The Lord of the Rings as a song sung by Frodo Baggins in the Prancing Pony inn. The extended version was republished in the 1962 collection The Adventures of Tom Bombadil.
The Tolkien family is an English family of German descent whose best-known member is J. R. R. Tolkien, Oxford academic and author of the fantasy books The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion.
Belbroughton Road is a residential road in the suburb of North Oxford, England. The road runs east from Banbury Road. At the other end is Oxford High School, a girls' school. South from the road about halfway along is Northmoor Road, where J. R. R. Tolkien lived for a while in the 1930s. At the eastern end is Charlbury Road.
Holywell Street is a street in central Oxford, England. It runs east–west with Broad Street to the west and Longwall Street to the east. About halfway along, Mansfield Road adjoins to the north.
Bardwell Road is a residential road in Oxford, England. It is located in North Oxford off the Banbury Road, within the area of Oxford once owned by St John's College, Oxford. The road is known for its schools, especially the Dragon School.
Linton Road is a road in North Oxford, England.
This is a list of all published works of the English writer and philologist J. R. R. Tolkien. Tolkien's works were published before and after his death.
Sandfield Road is a road in the suburb of Headington, Oxford, England. It is close to the John Radcliffe Hospital. It was home to author and academic J. R. R. Tolkien in the 1950s and 1960s.
Middle-earth is the setting of much of the English writer J. R. R. Tolkien's fantasy. The term is equivalent to the Miðgarðr of Norse mythology and Middangeard in Old English works, including Beowulf. Middle-earth is the human-inhabited world, that is, the central continent of the Earth, in Tolkien's imagined mythological past. Tolkien's most widely read works, The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, are set entirely in Middle-earth. "Middle-earth" has also become a short-hand term for Tolkien's legendarium, his large body of fantasy writings, and for the entirety of his fictional world.
The Shire is a region of J. R. R. Tolkien's fictional Middle-earth, described in The Lord of the Rings and other works. The Shire is an inland area settled exclusively by hobbits, the Shire-folk, largely sheltered from the goings-on in the rest of Middle-earth. It is in the northwest of the continent, in the region of Eriador and the Kingdom of Arnor.
The Vyne Ring or the Ring of Silvianus is a gold ring, dating probably from the 4th century AD, discovered in a ploughed field near Silchester, in Hampshire, England, in 1785. Originally the property of a British Roman called Silvianus, it was apparently stolen by a person named Senicianus, upon whom Silvianus called down a curse.
The Church of St Anthony of Padua, Oxford is a yellow brick-built Catholic church in suburb of Headington, east Oxford, Oxfordshire, England. The church building is located in Headley Way.
The Tolkien Society is an educational charity and literary society devoted to the study and promotion of the life and works of the author and academic J. R. R. Tolkien.
Manor Road is a road in central Oxford, England. It is a no through road that links St Cross Road to the west with St Catherine's College, one of the newer Oxford colleges, to the east. The road crosses the Holywell Mill Stream.