Episode 07: One Grave To Rule Them All

In this episode, Caitlin and Francesgrace are overjoyed to welcome their first official guest to the show: Jesse D Crichton, who makes them both cry.

LINK TO SHOW NOTES

Season 1. Episode 7. One Grave To Rule Them All.

Caitlin: Hello, and welcome to Grave Escapes, the podcast helps those who've died tell their stories once again.

INTRO MUSIC

Caitlin: Hey Frances. 

Frances: Hey. 

Caitlin: I thought you might be getting kind of tired of my voice. 

Frances: Ehh…Not really. 

Caitlin: Yeah, I know, but still it's like our listeners are like, Oh God, these two again. No, seriously, thank you for listening. 

Frances: Haha.

Caitlin: I appreciate it. But we actually thought we'd mix things up a little bit tonight and have one of the men behind the curtain come forward, so to speak. So we're actually joined tonight by our first guest ever! So…we’re joined by our usual producer, Jesse D. Crichton. 

Jesse: Hi Caitlin. Hi Frances. How are you? 

Frances: Hey. 

Caitlin: Good, good. 

Frances: Hey, if you're the man behind the curtain, does that mean we can refer to you as The Wizard? 

Jesse: I'll take it. 

Caitlin: So Jesse, and I have known each other for quite some time and one of the first things about him that blew my mind was…I walked into his living room and he had—I'm so sorry—It’s really ratchet-looking piece of art hanging on his wall, that said JRR Tolkien on it and I was like nerd! Then I immediately asked him what his Hogwarts houses. 

Frances: Haha!

Caitlin: Let’s be fair about this.

Frances: What is the answer to that? 

Caitlin: What's your Hogwarts house, Jesse?

Jesse: Oh, I'm a Slytherin. 

Frances: Yeah!!

Caitlin: Oh my God. I'm a Ravenclaw. 

Frances: Okay. That’s…I’ll take that.

Caitlin: More like… 

Caitlin and Frances: Slytherclaw!

Caitlin: Yeah. Okay. So it's not time for this, on this podcast anyway. Back to Tolkien, So he has this…it’s like a black and white tissue paper thing. And I was just like: well, what is that? And I mean, he just was like:  yeah, that's Tolkien's grave. 

Frances: What?

Caitlin: And I was like: no, but What? And he was like: yeah, it's a rubbing of Tolkien's grave. 

Frances: Oh, that's very cool. 

Caitlin: And I was just like: oh, I'm sorry, what? Okay. This is not ratchet anymore. This is really, really cool. So we started talking about it and as it turns out, Jessie had been to Tolkien's grave and was a lifelong Lord of the Rings fan.

Frances: Nice.

Caitlin: And so this year, when I'm not joining you wonderful people on here, I've actually been reading Lord of the Rings first time ever. 

Frances: Nice!

Caitlin: So I am in book two of book one, which is really hard to say. Yep. And we've just met everyone and we're out to take the ring back to the…

Frances: Mordor?

Caitlin: Mordor yeah, I'm really not good with this so far and I just have to say really quickly, I'm so fucking tired of the singing in this book. 

Frances: Haha!

Caitlin: But so with that, I wanted to bring Jesse on because I wanted to make sure that he got to kind of share his love of Tolkein, because this is actually a grave I've never been to. 

Frances: Very cool. Me either. Where is it? I don't even know where it is.

Caitlin: Oxford. 

Frances: Well, I'm so jealous. 

Caitlin: I do have to say this so I can get my pretentiousness out of the way: I did live in England for a while. And I actually, instead of going to Oxford, went to Wales because it was like one or the other for me. 

Frances: Wales is pretty cool. Here's a fun fact. I applied to Oxford. 

Caitlin: So you got in?

Frances: Haha. No, also I couldn't have afforded it anyway. 

Caitlin: See now they're like shaking in their boots. They're like: oh my God, Frances that famous podcaster who talks about dead people all the time. 

Frances: They wish they accepted me. 

Caitlin: Yeah, exactly. So speaking of Oxford talking is cold. The professor. 

Frances: Hmm. 

Caitlin: Mr wizard or The Wizard, as we’ve decided to start calling you.  Jesse, would you tell Frances and me about Tolkein? Do I call him him the. 

Jesse: Here on grave escapes, we often seek to tell the stories of those whose lives have faded away or been covered up from common knowledge. However, there are also those who have passed and left behind lives that have been well-studied and graves that have been well-tended. They have not been forgotten nor their stories corrupted. This attention doesn't mean that they aren't worth remembering or that they don't have something to teach us. The grave of one such individual is located in central England. I was fortunate enough to visit this place in 2007. 

My father took me on a miniature sort of grand tour after I graduated from the University of Rhode Island. And we actually visited several graves on that trip. 

Caitlin: Wait! What!

Frances: I'm so jealous. 

Caitlin: No, wait, I only, so do you have rubbings of everyone's grave somewhere in your house? 

Jesse: Oh, no, I don't. I only did the rubbing of Tolkien’s grave, but on that trip we saw the final resting place of Jim Morrison in Paris. 

Caitlin: Saw that!

Jesse: We found a small Victorian cemetery dedicated solely to soldiers, dogs in the middle of Edinburgh castle.

Frances: *gasp!*

Caitlin: We're going there, Frances. Go pack your bag. 

Frances: Yes!

Jesse: And we also ultimately made our way down to Oxford, England, which was a lovely little town. And from Oxford center, you can travel about three miles north and just on the other side of the, A40 is a beautiful modern cemetery called Wolvercote. 

Caitlin: Wol-ver-cote.  

Jesse: Wolvercote.

Caitlin: Can you break down the meaning?

Frances: Great names.

Jesse: I do not know the meaning of Wolvercote. When we were there, I didn't know how far away from like the university the cemetery would be. So I told my dad it'd be no big deal to walk. So it took us about an hour to get up there and find it. Well worth the walk. It's a beautiful part of the country. This cemetery, it is a well-marked modern well-tended cemetery with signs points as a note to notable graves and reminding you to keep off the grass.

And just a few minutes, walk from the entrance. You can find one grave that is usually a little more decorated than the rest. The plot itself has several plants and like tiny trees growing from it. There are usually a bunch of like letters and little Tolkiens of remembrance and tribute there. And when I was there, one of the trees was even decorated with a figurine of a little sorting Eagle, right over the tree. At the head of this plot is just a modest, normal average stone, which just list the names of the two people buried there: Edith Mary and John Ronald Reuel Tolkien. 

Caitlin: So his name was not James and I was wrong. 

Jesse: Not James.

Frances: Ronald? Did you say his middle name? The one of the Rs was Ronald?

Caitlin: So wait so…Ronald as in like 

Frances: Ronald McDonald? 

Caitlin: I was thinking Ron Weasley. Cause you see where my mind’s at.

Frances: Yep. that's okay. 

Caitlin: So it's John Ronald… 

Jesse: Reuel

Frances: Like R U H L E? 

Jesse: R E U E L.

Caitlin: What does that mean? 

Jesse: I have no idea. 

Frances: I know what Wolvercote means. It's a toponym. It means the cottage of a guy named Woolgar, 

Caitlin: What is a toponym? 

Frances: It's a place named that's based on either a feature or a person who lived in the place, 

Jesse: Probably like Smithfield. 

Frances: Yeah.

Caitlin: Because there were Smiths in the field.

Frances: Haha.

Jesse: There you go.

Caitlin: All right. We just…we really like Tolkien, guys. I’m sorry. We’re having a bit too much fun tonight. 

Frances: I gotta…this name, man. 

Jesse: So Ronald was his given name and that's how he was known to most of the people in his life. And so this is the final resting place of the Lord of the Rings author: JRR Tolkien at Oxford.

Caitlin: Was he like Professor Ronald? 

Jesse: No. Professor Tolkien. 

Caitlin: I don't know, some of my students call me Professor Caitlin. 

Frances: So that's weird. 

Jesse: It's a different time. 

Caitlin: Different time…women words allowed to be educated. 

Frances: I had a student call me Miss Frances the whole semester. 

Caitlin: Oh pass.

Frances: She was from South America. And I think it was like a cultural thing…It was kind of funny. 

Caitlin: I hate when people call me Miss period. I prefer Mx. So I'm just like: Hmm. Gross. Okay. So sorry. Anyway. We're trying not to be disrespectful on this podcast, but apparently tonight we have a case of the giggles. So how did—who was George…George? Wow. Nope… 

Frances: Haha. Tolkien

Jesse: Not George RR Martin. 

Caitlin: That's exactly what I was doing. 

Jesse: JRR Tolkien. In addition to their names on the stone and the dates that they lived. And two additional names under Edith's name is the name Luthien and under. Ronald's name was the name, Beren. This is actually incredibly important and incredibly romantic, but I will come back around to the significance of Beren and Luthien.

Before I get much further, please, everyone keep in mind. I am oversimplifying a lot of this for the sake of being clear and concise for more in-depth conversation, please do @ me on social media. And we'll talk about it. J R R Tolkien was no stranger to death and mortality, and these themes are very prominent in his writing.

For those who are unfamiliar, I don't know who would be, but just in case Tolkien is best known as the creator of Middle Earth and the author of the Lord of the Rings, a book that has become the blueprint for all fantasy stories to follow Middle Earth is considered by some, to be like an ancient version or alternate history of our own world and for the Lord of the Rings, to be a story out of that ancient version of earth, which Tolkien was merely translating from its original language into modern English. One could study the languages and linguistics of Tolkiens works for an entire lifetime, but take my word for it. It's a breathtaking body of work.

Middle Earth was inhabited by several races of people. Most of them were mortal, such as humans, dwarves, and hobbits, but one race in particular, the first born people in Middle Earth, the elves were considered immortal. 

So, what did these terms mortal and immortal mean to Tolkien? It might not be what you think. As a devout Catholic Tolkien believed in the eternal and indestructible soul.

Those who were mortal in his stories followed in their traditions, their bodies code and did die, but their indestructible spirits would leave this world. They're not tied to Middle Earth and they're allowed to pass on from this world and into a new existence. Nothing is written in his works about where these mortal spirits go.

The immortal elves on the other hand are. The elves are tied to this world and cannot leave for better or worse. They are stuck here forever. Even if their bodies are killed or their spirits linger for a time and may even be reborn here on earth or in Middle Earth. And so immortality comes with the price of never being allowed to move on and being forced to watch the world that you love, grow and change around you, while mortality is considered a gift. 

Caitlin: That's fucked up. 

Frances: It's true. 

Jesse: It was Catholic. 

Caitlin: I stand by what I just said. 

Frances: It makes complete sense. I've never considered the word immortal as being without mortality. 

Caitlin: Yeah, that’s exactly what it means, isn’t it? 

Frances: Like, it doesn't mean eternal. It means without mortality, mind blown. 

Caitlin: So I really, really wish that…Okay, maybe this is like my hypothetical question for everyone: If you could resurrect two authors and like, make them have a conversation that they've never met before I would choose Tolkien and Anne Rice. 

Frances: Uck, I will puke. 

Caitlin: I would love to see him hash it out over the word and mortality. 

Frances: That's fair. Anne Rice is so annoying. Sorry, everyone. 

Caitlin: Look. Don't disown your son. That’s all I’m going to say.

Frances: And her attitude on fanfiction drives me absolutely up a wall—I’m looking at you, Georgia RR Martin. 

Caitlin: So, okay. So obviously, I mean, we don't actually know this for certain, but we're assuming that Tolkien was mortal. 

Jesse: It seems so.

Frances: He wasn't an elf. 

Caitlin: So how does he become the professor? How does he become Professor Tolkien? How does he—I'm going to be honest with you. All I know about Tolkien is that he wrote these books. He's dead. He was friends with CS Lewis. 

Frances: And potentially TS Eliot?

Caitlin: Oh really? 

Frances: Because wasn't CS Lewis friends with TS Eliot. Wait, I might've made that up.

Jesse: I think you might have made that up. 

Frances: They might've been great enemies. 

Caitlin: Same thing, enemies to lovers, everyone. 

Frances: Oh dear. 

Caitlin: I’ll write that fanfiction, but so who was he? Did he always live in Oxford? Was he a child at some point? I’d assume. 

Jesse: He was a child at some point. Back to the names on Tolkien's grave: The story of Beren and Lithion. If you've ever read, Lord of the Rings is only alluded to in like one part and very, very early on in the story you did, the story is told in full in one of his lesser known works, The Silmarillion, which is something which was actually posthumously published and edited by his son, Christopher.

The Silmarillion tells the story of the creation of Middle Earth and several of the early legends of that world. And in one of these stories Beren a mortal man. Following the battle he's wandering the wilderness. He accidentally comes across Luthien an immortal elf and the two fall in love with one with each other. Naturally Luthien’s father King Thingol does not approve of this relationship. No mortal man could possibly be good enough for his immortal daughter, Luthien

Caitlin: Hold on. Hold on! Did you—Thingol?

Jesse: Thingol.

Frances: That's terrible. 

Jesse: It's exactly how it sounds 

Caitlin: Like thingy-gol? 

Frances: Actively terrible. 

Jesse: Yeah.

Caitlin: K. Keep going. 

Jesse: All right. I know some of these names might sound a little ridiculous, but again, if you dig into Tolkiens, work in the linguistic roots of everything, every name comes from a word in the languages that he invented, which are all based off of the Finnish language and a medieval Finnish in particular, which he was absolutely obsessed with.

Caitlin: So basically he saw a thing and a seagull was like, no kiss. 

Frances: Haha.

Jesse: No, but we'll go with that for now. 

Caitlin: I don't know if you guys know this, I know linguistics pretty well. Just made that up on the spot. 

Jesse: So Thingol, doesn't approve of this relationship between his daughter and the mere mortal man. So he sets an impossible task for Beren to prove his worth. I don't know how far into the lore. I really want to dig, but basically. The Satan of that world has a gem in his crown in Beren has to cut the gem from the iron crown of Melcor. If he can pull this off, you can marry his daughter. 

Caitlin: Do you mean Satan? Like as in the devil or Satan, as in like Macbeth?

Jesse: Satan, as in the actual devil. With Luthien’s help Beren actually succeeds at this task. It's a huge story. I highly recommend picking up the Silmarillion and reading through. 

Caitlin: She has to help the guy that's trying to improve himself?

Jesse: She doesn't have to, she wants to.

Caitlin: Right, but he's supposed to prove himself. 

Jesse: Yeah. 

Frances: But that's like an ancient Greek thing too. Didn't what’s-her-face help the guy with the Minotaur.

Jesse: Yes, exactly like that.

Frances: Sorry. Ariadne. Right? Yes. Okay. 

Caitlin: I have no idea. 

Frances: Yeah. So same thing. 

Caitlin: I literally went in to see Eurydice and halfway through was like, oh, This doesn't end well.

Frances: Greek tragedy. None of it ends well. 

Caitlin: Yeah, I know, but, okay, so Thingol… is Thingol single pleased. 

Frances: No, I imagine. 

Jesse: Actually he is. Having successfully cut the summer rule from the crown of medical. That's enough. He is accepted by king Fingal. He is allowed to marry Luthien, but shortly after in yet another battle Beren is killed and Luthien cannot bear this grief. And she also dies. And her spirit passes on to what they call the Hall's. Amanda, she's still tied to Middle Earth. She cannot actually die, but her spirit no longer occupies her body. It has gone. It has moved on. 

Frances: Wait, so she is hanging out in Odin’s Corpse Hall? 

Jesse: Luthien pleads with the gods of that world. She doesn't want to be separated from her love. So they grant Beren a new life on Middle Earth and allow Luthien the chance to renounce her immortality in return to live out her days with Beren in Middle Earth. They eventually do grow old and die. This time they share the same fate, passing on together from Middle Earth. 

Frances: Aww!

Jesse: All of the histories of Middle Earth. This has happened twice. This happened to Beren and Luthien. And this is also the story of Arwen and Aragorn from Lord of the Rings. Arwen makes the same choice that Luthien makes: to give up her immortality so that she can die and stay with Aragorn for all time.

Now, if we go back into the Tolkiens’ lives, we see a somewhat similar if much less epic version of that story. By the time they met Ronald and Edith were actually both orphans. She was three years older than him and she was a member of the Anglican church while he was a member of the Catholic Church.

Frances: Same difference.

Jesse: No good. 

Caitlin: Yes. 

Jesse: I love hearing these things from primary sources or at least secondary sources and I am neither of those things. So, according to biographer Humphrey Carpenter, Edith and Ronald took to frequenting Birmingham tea shops, especially one which had a balcony overlooking the pavement there. They would sit in throw lumps of sugar, into the hats of passersby moving to the next table.

Frances: HAHAHA.

Jesse: When the sugar bowl was empty.

Frances: I love that!
Jesse: Two people of their personalities and their position romance was bound to flourish. Both were orphans in need of affection, and they found that they could give that affection to each other. During the summer of 1909, they decided that they were in love. 

However, back to my own words, the people in charge of them both since they're both basically children, were strongly opposed to this relationship and they were forbidden from seeing each other until Tolkien reached the age of 21, even though they only met when he was 16. Nevertheless, their love held true. And he proposed to her in a letter written on the evening of his 21st birthday. 

Frances: Aww.

Jesse: Apparently he was a good letter writer because though she had moved away and had since been engaged to someone, within that week, they met up again in person. She returned her engagement ring to the other guy and got engaged to Tolkien, instead. 

Frances: I love that. Everything about that. Oh my God, that's the best. That sounds like Alexander Hamilton.

Jesse: It really does.

Frances: Aww.

Jesse: So at that point, she even leaves her church to join the Catholic Church. And they were then married a few years later and were only married for three months before Tolkien was compelled to ship off to fight in the First World War. 

Frances: Oh yuck. 

Caitlin: No. 

Frances: Ooh.

Caitlin: I mean, he doesn't die, but I'm still nervous. 

Jesse: So it was she. I, this maybe goes without saying, but this was a trying time for both Ronald and Edith. She was afraid for his life every day. I mean, she's been recorded as saying that every knock on the door would, you know, would cause her a panic because that could be the knock where they brought back the news of his death. And he was at war. He was at the battle of the Somme and he watched nearly all of his childhood friends in nearly all of the soldiers under his command die in that battle. He, and like one other person came back from that. 

Frances: I did a paper that I had to present at a conference when I was in graduate school on a certain type of literature in World War One, it is astonishing on every level that he managed to come back from that and write anything at all. But in particular, something as richly detailed as the Lord of the Rings series.

There's a poet from the first world war who described…or there's a, there's a scholar who was a soldier in the first world war who talks about how that war killed language. Like metaphor died in world war one. And yet somehow Tolkien came out of that and wrote the Lord of the rings. That's astonishing.

Jesse: He definitely faced his fair share of trauma in this. I mean, like I said, literally everyone around him died. Perhaps fortunately earlier in the battle than would have been the case for a lot of other people, he contracted trench fever from an awful outbreak of lice during the battle. And I think before it was technically over, he was sent back to England to recover and then spent the rest of the war serving at home.

Frances: Lucky him…like nice.

Jesse: Yes, he even got to live with Edith on one of the army bases in England. They were very fortunate in that. He went on from there to a career in academics and in writing. Before the war, he had already been studying linguistics…I forget under whom, but he had some fairly impressive to tutelage. And in the following years he studied in created languages. He set out on his own translation of Beowulf. He taught at the University of Leeds and at Pembroke college, Oxford university, throughout the Second World War, he was contracted by the government as a code breaker for his linguistic skills, and following the war, he took a post as the Merton Professor of English Languages and Literature at Oxford University, a chair that he held until his retirement in 1959. 

Frances: *loud gasp*

Caitlin: Was the professor a doctor? 

Jesse: I don't believe he received his doctorate…

Caitlin: I’m kind of okay with that.

Jesse: Until if I remember what I read right, I think it was 1971 before he received his honorary doctorate.

Caitlin: Yeah, I was about to say…Oh, my God. 

Frances: I don't think I realized how recently he was alive. 

Caitlin: I mean, it wasn't like yesterday. 

Frances: No, but if he got… Was he alive for the honorary doctorate in 71? 

Jesse: Yes. 

Frances:  That's not that long ago for one of the most major writers in English fantasy, actually the most major writer in English. 

Jesse: So much can be said of those years of him teaching at Oxford and the work he was doing and his friendships with other writers like CS Lewis, but it's also all been said elsewhere and has very little to the little to do with the story of his grave.

So we're going to, you know…I think most people are aware of Lord of the rings and just say that he was a like The Professor of English language at Oxford for a couple of decades. It's pretty sufficient. The key things to remember about those years about these foundations are that these foundational experiences from growing up in an orphan in the church to meeting Edith, to experiencing the trauma and loss of war…Those are what led him to creating the languages and peoples and histories of Middle Earth. 
Edith herself was the direct inspiration for both Luthien and Arwen from the way that he loved her from the way that he describes those characters in the books. She was Luthien and Arwen are the most beautiful people to ever live in Middle Earth. And he thought that way of Edith, she was the most beautiful person to have ever lived. 

He spent his life, he dedicated his life to realizing those stories and in that place for his languages and for those characters and for her. And he continued to refine his thoughts in these stories and do this work through his retirement and until he died. 

Now after 1959 during his retirement, they did get a little bit of a break from Oxford. They moved to a coastal resort town called Bournemouth, where Edith got the chance to live out her days as a society matron. Up until this point from the 1930s to basically the 1959, she was the professor's wife, a role that she was happy with. She really…she was happy with that life in Oxford and with her children, with her grandchildren and all of that. But once they moved out to Bournemouth…for those who have seen like the gilded age or to a lesser extent, Bridgeton and you see society and how that's portrayed that's what she got to live in the 1960s for a brief period of time.

She was one of the older women in society in this town of Bournemouth. And it's a life that she was very, very comfortable in

Caitlin: Someone tell Julian Fellowes. Cause I'd watched a TV show on that. 

Frances: Oh yeah.

Jesse: Good idea—Edith died at the age of 82 in 1971. At this time, following her death, Tolkien decided he didn't want to be in Bournemouth anymore. He moved back to Oxford. The University gave him an apartment: just here, live here, please. 

Caitlin: Yeah, why not?

Jesse: He had her buried there in the town of Oxford. He was happy to be back there obviously, but he missed Edith terribly. She was the light of his universe. She was everything to him. 

Caitlin: I don't really love how we started this podcast giddy and now I'm really, really sad and like getting kind of teary. 

Frances: I love this story though. 

Caitlin: This is really pretty. 

Frances: I want this movie real bad. 

Jesse: The first half is a movie. It came out a couple of years ago. It was called Tolkien. It's fantastic. 

Frances: Okay, I’m on it. 

Caitlin: Frances, just come over. Let's go to Oxford and watch it there on their graves.

Frances: I'll bring my laptop. We can stream it. 

Caitlin: There you go. 

Jesse: So to capture Tolkien's feelings after Edith passed, I think it's best to leave it to his own words. After his wife's death in 1971, he remembered, “I never actually called Edith Luthien, but she was the source of the story that in that time became the chief part of the Silmarillion. It was first conceived in the small Woodland Glade filled with hemlock at ruse in Yorkshire, where I was for a brief time in command of an outpost of the Humber Garrison in 1917. And she was able to live with me there for a while. In those days, her hair was Raven, her skin clear, her eyes brighter than you have seen them, and she could sing and dance, but the story has gone crooked and I am left and I cannot plead before the inexorable Mandos. 

Caitlin: Go away, Jesse. 

Frances: Okay. Now, I'm crying too.

Caitlin: That's so beautiful…This could take a minute. 

Frances: This is a whole thing. 

Caitlin: Yeah. Well, didn't expect this one ever. 

Frances: Nope. 

Caitlin: Okay…So, inappropriate joke. Anyone? To help get us back on track?

Frances: Nope. 

Caitlin: So he's alive without her, which is like heartbreaking. 

Frances: How old is he at this point? 

Caitlin: Yeah, so he's he's three years younger. So she's 82?

Frances: So, he's 79?

Caitlin: Okay. 

Jesse: Yes. And he himself died less than two years later. 

Caitlin & Frances: Awww.

Caitlin: He died of a broken heart, didn’t he?

Jesse: He died in 1973 at the age of 81, having suffered a stomach ulcer and subsequent chest infection. 

Okay. So not a broken heart. An infected heart.Jesse: He was buried in the same plot as Edith and just like Beren and Luthien, their fate was to pass on from this world together.

Caitlin: Awwww.

Frances: Oh my God. You’re the worst. 

Caitlin: Oh my god.

Frances: If I wake up tomorrow with a puffy face, I'm blaming you. 

Jesse: I will accept that blame gladly. 

Caitlin:  I don't even need to know anything else. That's enough. 

Frances: That's perfect. 

Caitlin: Oh my God. Okay. So…Did you get robbing of Edith's grave? 

Jesse: It's the same stone. 

Caitlin: Okay. Okay. Okay. I was about to say, cause like, don't be a dick to Edith

Frances: I love her. I don't know anything about her. 

Caitlin: I just want to go hang out with her in 1960 type society. 

Frances: Oh God. That would be fun. 

Caitlin: So…I’m a little afraid to ask this, Jesse…where are we going from here? You’re like…and then they had a child and the child was dead, dead at birth or something. Where’re we goin?

Jesse: Oh, no, they had four or five kids. I forget exactly. 

Caitlin: Did they all make it to adulthood?

Jesse: I believe they all made it to adulthood. They were pretty fortunate that way. Tolkien did deal with like chronic chest infections since his entire life, a lot of influenza and bronchitis and things like that. 

Frances: Ima blame World War One. 

Jesse: Priscilla only passed away in…might've been 2006, something like that.

Caitlin: His son Christopher's still alive though, right?

Jesse: Christopher might be alive actually. Yeah, but very old. 

Frances: It screws me up in my head real bad. Like…he’s a classic and in my brain, he should have died a long time ago and all of his children should probably be dead by now. And his children's children maybe. But no, it was like a minute ago.

Caitlin: My parents were not children when…oh, I guess my mom was. Okay. My parents were somewhat children when he died. They would remember… 

Frances: My parents got married the year he died. I mean, they got married at like infant age compared to now, but yeah. 

Caitlin: Yeah. 

Frances: Wow. What? Okay. 

Jesse: Sorry. So to bring things back to a more practical place.

Caitlin: No I'm broken. 

Jesse: The Tolkien's grave can be found in Wolvercote cemetery, just north of Oxford, England. I recommend taking the bus from town center that only takes about 15 minutes. Once you're there. All you need to do is follow the signs that say Tolkien, with the little arrow. 

After you see the grave, I highly recommend going back to Oxford. Stop at a little pub near town center called the Eagle and Child. It's still there. Tolkien himself used to spend his evenings there, trading stories and debating the finer points of their stories and literature with other members of his writing club, the Englands, which included the author of the Chronicles of Narnia CS Lewis. 

Frances: Who was friends with TS Eliot.

Jesse: Oh good. 

Caitlin: I like that. I have TS Eliot at poem tattooed on my body. 

Frances: I don't like him, but that's predominantly because I don't like his Miltonic and metaphysical poetry criticism. 

Caitlin: I just love the fact that he wrote basically a short story, described it as a poem and made a bunch of shit-metaphors. Love it.

Jesse: At the Eagle and child, I do recommend getting the fish and chips. They are delicious. The mushy peas that come with it are amazing. Don't make that face at mushy peas. Mushy peas are the best. They're actually really good. 

Frances: No. 

Caitlin: Are you like an anti-peas person or anti-mush person? 

Frances: Some of both, but mostly peas. I can't stand on the flavor of them. I don't like the texture of them. 

Caitlin: Huh? You would probably hate mushy peas. 

Frances: Yeah. Nope. My mom would love it though. 

Caitlin: I think we should like make this our pilgrimage, like first Grave Escape’s trip, but I think we should walk the whole way. 

Frances: I'll walk out to the cemetery. It's only three miles, but if we are going to England to do a pilgrimage, we better stop in Bemerton and see my absolute favorite author of all time, who no one's ever heard of: George Herbert.

Jesse: For anyone who would like to honor Jr. Tolkien in some way, the traditional thing to do is on his birthday, which is January 3rd, you get a glass of your favorite beverage. Doesn't matter what it is. Tolkien liked red wine. He liked dark beers. Coke Zero works just fine.

Frances: Haha.

Jesse: And at any point in. You stand up, raise your glass, say the words “The Professor,” take a sip and sit back. That's the traditional Tolkien birthday toast. 

Frances: I definitely thought you were going to have us pour one out for him. And I was like, yes, I will dump something out on the ground for him. 

Jesse: No, you forget. This is the man that created habits. He would not want you to waste a perfectly good beer or other beverage. You drink that. 

Frances: Yeah, that's fair. 

Caitlin: So I understand, we just ended up like on a happy note of like, yeah, everyone posts with your Coke Zero or whatever. But oh my God. I don't think I realized, like he loved deep.

Frances: I love that. 

Caitlin: I love their love. 

Frances: Yes, that's really cute. 

Caitlin: I don't have anything like the comeback with that. Did your… so you were…how old were you when you went? 

Jesse: 2007. So I was 26. 

Caitlin: How old was your dad? Sorry if you're listening, Ethan. 

Jesse: Hold on. That's that's more math. So he was 53. 

Caitlin: Wow. So what did your dad think of it? Like, did he, was he emotionally tied to this experience or was it like…What was your emotion like when you saw this? 

Jesse: I don't know. I didn't know that story at all, when I was there, I just knew I was a fan of Lord of the Rings and I wanted this opportunity to pay respects and I thought it would be really interesting to get a rubbing of the tombstone. So I have, I have Tolkien's entire name, birth and death dates and Beren. And I think due to the size of the paper, I could only get Luthien. Maybe the dates she lived, but I don't think I got her actual name on the paper, so it might be worth getting another rubbing. 

Caitlin: All right, let's go. 

Frances: I'm down. 

Caitlin: So I will say for all of our listeners out there, we are running into a small problem with providing you photos with this grave because in 2006, we didn't have smartphones. So we are going to provide the rubbing as a photo and Jesse and his dad are currently looking for the actual prints from their trip to see if they can get one of the photos of Jesse there. 

Frances: And we'll link photos of the grave to the show notes like usual. FindAGrave will be there, so you can click through.

Caitlin: It usually goes against our policy that we don't have the grave actual, the actual grave photo, but considering we have almost a piece of it, we're letting this one slide.

Frances: Which is cooler.

Jesse: I also found out today that the digital camera the photos were taken on has been found and the memory card is still in it. We may yet be able to get the photos.

Frances: Oh yeah! 

Caitlin: I hope your dad listens to this. 

Jesse: I’ll give him the link. 

Caitlin: Hi, Ethan. I love this. It's like…I don't know how to put this…you know, Frances and I have talked about this a lot, and it's the whole idea of… one of the reasons we do this is because we don't want people to be forgotten, but I think that one of the things that we as mortals…

Frances: Heh.

Caitlin: Look what I did there.

Frances: See that. 

Caitlin: Need to remember is that we all within our lives right now have these great love stories and we can preserve them just like this. We might not be an Oxford professor, but the people we love are around us for a reason. And this is just such a beautiful story. Oh my God. 

Frances: I think so. We talk a lot about like giving voices back to people who've been deprived of them. And I think…I know obviously Tolkien had his own voice. He wrote plenty, but I think one of the things that celebrity tends to do is to create…a figure rather than a person so that like we encounter Tolkien and we think we know who he is because he's the guy who wrote Lord of the Rings or we, we encounter Douglas Adams and we think we know who he is because of the books he wrote, but we don't actually know his story per se. 

Before you started talking, I was like, yeah, he's that guy who hung out with CS Lewis and like wrote some stuff and he knew languages. That's all I knew. And I knew, I think I knew he was Catholic, but that's all I knew about him. I have no idea about his personal life. So you are giving a voice back to someone whose story has been forgotten. It's just… it's been subsumed under his public character and the figure that we've created of him. 

Caitlin: I do want to give just a quick update. Frances, you are actually correct in something, Tolkien’s children actually have all passed with the most recent actually being in February of this year.

Frances: Oh no. Covid?

Oh, I remember hearing about that… 

Caitlin: Yeah, I actually don't know the cause of death. Give me just a second. I can look it up, but yeah, they unfortunately have all passed. Of course, you know, they have kids and I'm sure at this point, those kids have kids. So, yeah, I can't find her death cause, but I mean, she was born in 1929, so it could be old age.

Frances: So old age. She was almost a hundred. 

Caitlin: Yeah. So he had four children, John Francis, who…1917 to 2003, Michael Hilary, 1920 to 1984. Christopher, who he was the one who I know most, because he's really overseeing the estate. He did actually pass in 2020, but born 1924. And then Priscilla passed away 1929 to 2022. 

Frances: So what you're telling me is three of the four children lived really long lives.

Caitlin: Yeah. Yeah. And Christopher did pass away before COVID began. He passed away in January 2020 too… 2020 

Frances: Also 

Caitlin: Life and time. Yeah. I'm wow.

Frances: That was a rollercoaster. I was not expecting. 

Caitlin: That was also not expecting. I thought we were going to like make fun of hobbits. 

Frances: I got to say, though, as our first guest, you knocked it out of the park.

Caitlin: You set the gravestone high.

Frances: Like this is…this is full on obelisk level gravestones here. 

Caitlin: Oh my God. I am…I don't like crying. I'm the kind of person who bottles up my emotions. And now this is going out into the world, so…

Jesse:  Well now, you know what happens when you ask me to write something for you?

Caitlin: Okay. We'll never get a parent, but with that, thank you so much for joining us, Jesse. Thank you for coming. Out from behind the curtain out from behind the podcast, editing software…

Jesse: Out of the booth. 

Caitlin: There we go. And telling us this beautiful story about Beren? Luthien? 

Frances: Can I make a real bad joke?

Caitlin: Yeah, do it. 

Frances: You're the wizard and you definitely made this episode magic. 

Caitlin: Oh yeah, you did. 

Frances: I went there. 

Caitlin: But with that, thank you all for joining us. We will see you next time and as always, we’ll see you in the cemetery.

OUTRO MUSIC

Caitlin: Grave Escapes is hosted, written and produced by Caitlin Howle and Francesgrace Ferland and is produced and edited by Jesse D. Crichton. The music is melancholy after sound by Kai Engel. Follow us on social media to see images of today's graves and more about us. Our social handle is Grave Escapes. For a transcript, show notes, and land acknowledgement, visit us online at www.graveescapes.com We'll see you in the cemetery.

Frances: We’d like to acknowledge that we recorded this podcast on the traditional lands of the Wampanoag, Pokanoket, and Narragansett peoples. Here in the Northeast and all across the country, native peoples are still here and thriving. For more information about indigenous history, we’ve added a link in the show notes to An Indigenous People’s History of the United States as a place to begin. For ways to support native leaders and communities, we’ve added links to both the North American Indian Center of Boston and Native Land Conservancy.