Best in show

“George Ripley, a 15th-century Augustinian canon, wrote a lengthy work called The Twelve Gates Leading to the Discovery of the Philosopher’s Stone, a long poem, which was one of the very first explorations in verse of the subject of alchemy.

Around the same time, two people produced what became known as the Ripley Scroll, a series of associated emblems and writings that were basically a pictorial description of the same text.

While the original scroll was subsequently lost, a number of copies – dating from the 15th and 16th centuries and ranging in size and detail – survive.

The Bodleian has five, which are all about 20 feet long and two feet wide and feature similar iconography. Each has a huge magus-like figure holding an enormous glass retort, which looks like a pregnant belly containing images of many magical goings-on.

There are lurid depictions of dragons and toads and a woman with a lizard tail and webbed feet alongside lines of Ripley’s original verse divided up by gnomic utterances. It’s all a bit strange and difficult to comprehend.

This image is typical – it features lions and writing, which reads: “Here is the last vof the Red and the beginning to put away the dead. The Elixir Vitae.”

We originally approached this exhibition with the thinking that, while Cambridge traditionally produces mathematicians, Oxford has forged a great many literary figures, the university being particularly renowned for the Oxford School of fantasy writing.

So we chose five modern exponents of the genre – CS Lewis, JRR Tolkien, Susan Cooper, Alan Garner and Philip Pullman – and placed them in an historical context as inheritors of a long tradition of people writing about mythology and magic.

For example, we feature the Ashburnham burnt fragment – an 11th-century Anglo-Saxon life of St Basil, which survived a great fire that destroyed many ancient documents – alongside Tolkien’s own facsimile of a burnt manuscript that he made of the Book of Mazarbul from the Lord of the Rings.

There are also works connected to Arthurian legends and Norse mythology, two cases of magical beasts and another containing fortune-telling material alongside Pullman’s alethiometer from His Dark Materials.

There’s hundreds and hundreds of years’ worth of work and something for everyone. When I wandered through this morning, the teenagers were clustered around the more modern stuff but there was a chap who spent a good 15 minutes kneeling at the witchcraft case that contains the First Folio Macbeth.”

Magical Books: From the Middle Ages to Middle-earth runs until 27 October

Judith Priestman is the curator of modern literary manuscript collections at the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford