Today Oxford was transformed into Oxford of 1914, at the beginning of World War 1, with young soldiers, horses, and gowned students walking about town. It felt a bit like a time-warp.
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Brasenose Lane and the Radcliffe Square was the site of today's film shoot for the movie "Tolkien", a biopic film of the author JRR Tolkien.
The movie is about the the early years of the author as he attended college, made friends with a group of outcasts at school, and found love and artistic inspiration.
Actors waiting on their marks to rehearse a scene on Brasenose Lane, across from Exeter College where Tolkien attended in 1911 to 1915.
Nicholas Hoult stars as Tolkien and Lily Collins is cast as his love, Edith Bratt
Tolkien enlisted as a second lieutenant in the Lancashire Fusiliers in 1915. He married the love of his life, Edith Bratt, in Warwick on 22 March 1916 before shipping out. Tolkien met Edith as a freshman at his boarding house in 1911, he was 16 and she was 19.
After enlisting, Tolkien was sent to active duty on the Western Front, just in time for the Somme offensive. After four months in and out of the trenches, he succumbed to “trench fever”, a form of typhus-like infection common in the insanitary conditions, and was sent back to England, where he spent the next months in hospital in Birmingham. Many of these experiences became inspiration for his Lord of the Rings novels.
The movie is directed by Finnish director Dome Karukoski and the script is by David Gleeson and Stephen Beresford.
