Tolkien’s Parish

Today marks the founding of the Birmingham Oratory in 1848. After his conversion, John Henry Newman decided to join the Oratorians, founded by St. Philip Neri in 1575. For Newman, the Oratory most closely approximated his ideal of religious life with its balance between the communal life and individual initiative. When he returned to England, he established an Oratory in Birmingham, then a leading industrial town. He was associated with this community until his death in 1890. In 1859 Newman founded an Oratory School, whose faculty included a young Gerard Manley Hopkins. Also associated with the Birmingham Oratory was J.R.R. Tolkien, whose mother named a Birmingham Oratorian, Father Francis X. Morgan, as his guardian. By the age of twelve, Tolkien’s parents were both dead, and for seven years Father Morgan oversaw his education and upbringing. Tolkien lived with a family in the parish, but he considered the Oratory his real home during that time. (Tolkien fans will be interested to know that among his neighbors was one Dr. Joseph Sampson Gamgee.)