Everyday Literary in England

They say to “write what you know.” Very good advice, though it’s always tempting not to follow it because what you know the best often feels mundane and uninteresting. One of the major reasons I’ve wanted to go to England for so long is to see the places my favorite authors and role models in writing lived. Though they wrote clever fiction and even engaging fantasy, I suspected that most of their writing was birthed out of their normal lives and the settings which to them were everyday, maybe even mundane. Yet, they also saw beauty in the ordinary and wove the everyday into the fantastic.

This is a list of things I saw in England that were probably just a little bit of everyday life to the authors, but revealed beauty to me as a reader.

The doorknobs in the center of the doors like in the Hobbit. Post about this realization and Oxford here.

Barrows: Barrows are a landscape feature in the Lord of the Rings and though I had a general idea of what they looked like; I hadn’t seen it in person until hiking along a section of the Cotswold Way.

“Hedges and ditches”: Walking along the public footpaths called to mind this phrase from Robert Louis Stevenson’s poem, From a Railway Carriage. Of course, using a train for transportation for the first time also made me think of this poem!

Church bells ringing on a Tuesday evening for practice made me think of The Nine Tailors by Dorothy Sayers…Nine tailors make a man…

Walking through Magdalen college gave me a sense of Oxford University as described in so many stories (though perhaps different specific colleges) from Gaudy Night by Sayers, Brideshead Revisited by Eveyln Waugh (I’m reading this now and very excited to recognize specific landmarks mentioned), as well as the history at Magdalen related to C.S. Lewis.

The long days (sunrise near 4:45 am and sunset at 9:30 on the longest day of the year) made me think of Bed in Summer by Robert Louis Stevenson.

The idea of mudlarking and easily finding “treasure” in shallow water made me think of The Lord of the Rings recounting how the ring first came to Smeagol.

Standish Wood was so dark and heavy even on a bright sunny summer day. This made me think of Robin Hood and Sherwood Forest and the poem ‘Tis Merry in the Greenwood by Walter Scott.

The canal locks in the Cotswolds flanked by weeping willows were (of course) reminders of the Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame (he’s buried in Oxford though I didn’t have time to find the spot on my brief stay).

Sheep in the fields brought to mind All Creatures Great and Small and other James Herriot stories.

Not literature, but the rivers reminded me of the pre-Raphaelite painting of Ophelia.

I’m inspired to keep writing, not just about th places I travel to, but about the everyday beauty where I live. Who knows who might be touched by the kind of writing that feels like the heart of the Blue Ridge mountains in a small city by the James River?