Cultural Associations
- Novels
The Bodleian is used as background scenery in Dorothy L. Sayers Gaudy Night, features in Michael White's Equinox, and is one of the libraries consulted by Christine Greenaway (one of Bodley's librarians) in Colin Dexter's Inspector Morse novel The Wench is Dead. The denouement of Michael Innes's Operation Pax (1951) is set in an imaginary version of the underground bookstack, reached at night by sliding down the 'Mendip cleft', a chute concealed in Radcliffe Square.
Since J.R.R. Tolkien had studied philology at Oxford and eventually became a professor, he was very familiar with the Red Book of Hergest which is kept at the Bodleian on behalf of Jesus College. Tolkien later created his own fictional Red Book of Westmarch telling the story of The Lord of the Rings. Many of Tolkien's manuscripts are now at the library.
Historian and novelist Deborah Harkness, set much of the early part of her 2011 novel, A Discovery of Witches, in the Bodleian, particularly the Selden End. The novel also features one of the library's Ashmolean manuscripts (Ashmole 782) as a central element of the book.
- Location filming
The Library's fine architecture has made it a favourite location for filmmakers, representing either Oxford University or other locations. It can be seen in the opening scene of The Golden Compass, Brideshead Revisited (1981 TV serial), Another Country (1984), The Madness of King George III (1994), and the first two Harry Potter films, in which the Divinity School doubles as the Hogwarts hospital wing and Duke Humfrey's Library as the Hogwarts library. In The New World (2005), the library edifice is portrayed as the entrance to the Royal Court of the English monarchy. The Bodleian also featured in the Inspector Morse televised spin off Lewis, in the episode "And the Moonbeams Kiss the Sea", where a murder takes place in the basement.
- Quotation
Also, the first few words of the Latin version of the reader's promise seen above (Do fidem me nullum librum vel) can be found on the linguist's hat in the 1996 miniseries Gulliver's Travels.
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