An Oxford Experience

Earlier this year, I spent some time at the University of Oxford. In this first of two blog entries, I’ll try to paint a picture of what it was like to live and study there – but stay tuned for the next post, in which you will get to know a notorious canon regular from South Lincolnshire and his curious accent marks!

I went to Oxford as a kind of ‘academic visitor’ to do research relating to my master’s thesis, and while not being a regular student had its perks – no essays waiting to be written, no exams to cram for – it also meant that I didn’t have college affiliation. Which is kind of a big deal. The University has 39 colleges and six permanent private halls (with religious affiliation); there is also a permanent private hall called Regent’s Park College and a college called St. Edmund Hall, which is sort of confusing. Anyway, it is to their college or hall that Oxford students go to study, hang out, make friends, and – as I was to discover – eat. Lacking college affiliation, I was worried my stay would turn out to be a very isolating experience (which is precisely the wording used in the information sheet for academic visitors), but the only noticeable downside was that I found myself queueing for a sandwich at Greggs on almost a daily basis. I’m sure I feature in countless tourists’ photos as the guy obnoxiously munching a Greggs sandwich in a niche of the otherwise quite majestic Radcliffe Camera (Rad Cam for short), but lunch-situation aside, my time in Oxford turned out pretty great, not least because everyone in the English Faculty was so friendly and welcoming.

I emailed a professor on Sunday before first week and asked him whether I could take one of his classes, and he said ‘yes’, and would I like to come to that other class, too? And so I took classes on transcription and the history of the book and editing, attended lectures on early English literature, and went to numerous other medieval-themed events – rather than sit alone in the library all day, every day. Research seminars in particular were a prime source of nourishment – for one thing intellectually, of course, but for another thing quite literally, because the Medieval English Research Seminar was regularly followed by sandwiches and coffee and sometimes Professor Wakelin’s home-baked cake, other seminars had cookies and coffee, and the Medieval History Seminar at magnificent All Souls College – wine.

After two pandemically-affected years of hardly doing anything that required leaving my room, the amount of social interaction I got at Oxford was inordinate; I felt like a hermit leaving his cell for the first time (and thoroughly enjoying it). The Old English Reading Group gathered in a pub fortnightly, on weekends I explored the environs of Oxford with a medievalist hiking club of sorts, and one of the weirder “lectures” I went to included a professor blowing a huge trumpet, drinks on a college principal’s rooftop terrace, and a late-evening guided tour of a real Norman crypt containing fake medieval gravestones set up there for the filming of an Inspector Morse episode. No less weird for an outsider like myself was the concept of formal hall, multi-course dinners with all kinds of strange rules concerning dress and behaviour; I was lucky enough to meet a few friendly students through whose invitations I got to experience that side of Oxford life, too.

There are numerous little things to keep in mind around Oxford. You’ll need to know that deer-park-owning Magdalen College and the eponymous bridge are pronounced MAUDLIN, that your student identification card, which gets you in everywhere for free, is your Bod Card (for Bodleian, pronounced BOD-LEE-UN, as in the library), and that although Christ Church (of Harry Potter movie fame) is in fact a college you mustn’t ever call it Christ Church College! Some colleges are incredibly rich, and it shows in their grounds and splendid buildings; I don’t think there is anything like it in Germany. If I were asked to describe how Oxford differed from a German university, I would just point to Christ Church’s picture gallery: Besides Mannerist pieces by Tintoretto or Veronese, Da Vinci drawings and much else, they exhibited a Renaissance painting “on loan from the Junior Common Room” – that’s a place where undergrads drink beer and have parties.

Almost everything in Oxford comes with an amusing anecdote, and my accommodation was no exception. I lived on the same street Tolkien lived on in the 1930s, in a house built in the 1900s for a famous British-German scholar who was then the world’s authority on Silk Road manuscripts (though he had been deceived by an infamous forger), many of which would have been shipped to his house from Asia – which seemed an appropriate parallel, given that I had come to Oxford for a manuscript myself! The owner of the house, a retired academic who spoke perfect German and sadly passed away a few months after I left, helped me quite a bit in navigating town and university.

Soon after my arrival I had been introduced to the concept of Oxford time, used to describe the strange simultaneous quickness and slowness with which terms there seem to progress. Essentially, a week in you think it’s been four and come eighth week you can hardly believe term’s over already. And to be sure, when the time came to return to Düsseldorf, I found it hard to believe that I’d been away for almost three months. I was also surprised at the amount of work I’d been able to do despite all the things that had distracted me – the time had passed all too quickly, but it seemed the individual days had accommodated more activity than they usually did. And in my next post I’ll talk about that certain subset of activities which did not consist in distractions from my research.