Exploration and His Dark Materials

Like many people who grew up reading the His Dark Materials trilogy by Philip Pullman, I have avidly devoured the new Book of Dust and the new TV series. In honor of these fantastic books, I wanted to talk about my own attempts to be an explorer like Lyra and Pantalaimon.

Journeys

The trilogy His Dark Materials and the follow up Book of Dust fit the very definition of a bildungsroman (a novel dealing with one’s formative years or spiritual education). They follow the coming of age story of Lyra Silvertongue and her daemon Pan, and, inspired by William Blake, their journey from innocence to experience. Much of what makes the books so beloved is how Philip Pullman seeds the imaginative reality of Lyra’s worlds with the tactile existence of details from our world that we can see and touch and believe.

While attending a conference in Oxford, I spent some time on my own journey, wandering the streets, canals, markets and alleyways that Lyra might have explored in her own world. I marveled at franchise cafes built inside preserved medieval buildings, the ache of cobbles beneath my feet, and the history lining every stone and doorway in the mist and damp of a spring afternoon. The green trees glowed against the yellow-rough stone of Oxford and I felt as if at any moment I could turn a corner and meet my very own daemon.

Though of course, to truly get into the meat of the books, Oxford’s museums truly allow one’s imagination to wander, finding objects and places that echo some of the remarkable details in the books. The obvious was a visit to the Pitt Rivers Museum, visited by Lyra in the Subtle Knife in her quest to find out more about skulls with holes from trephination at the urging of her alethiometer. Luckily it existed in Will’s Oxford (that is, our Oxford).

The Pitt Rivers Museum

You enter the Pitt Rivers Museum through the Oxford Museum of Natural History, and for a fan of His Dark Materials this is an opportunity to walk down the aisles of taxidermy animals musing on the settled shape of your daemon, or keeping an eye out for one of Pan’s many forms. The museum even has a few specimens they encourage you to pet, like a plump brown bear.

Brown bears are #mammals that can grow up to 8 feet, and they live in the #forests & #mountains of northern North #America, #Europe and #Asia. They are omnivores, & in the Autumn brown bears can eat up to 90 pounds of food each day in preparation for hibernating. #Oxford #Museum

— Oxford University Museum of Natural History (@morethanadodo) February 21, 2020

The heart of the museum is the original steel and glass-roofed Victorian building, and most of the cases are original to the founding of the museum. The central space is filled with these moveable cabinets and feels like a mysterious storehouse as you move through it. The dim lighting preserves the material on display with the side effect of making the space sleepy and secret.

The Pitt Rivers Museum is an ethnographic museum founded by Augustus Henry Lane-Fox Pitt Rivers, an officer in the British Army in the 19th century. He collected many objects during his travels and military duty and believed in displaying objects according to function and form (Weapons, Food, Medicine, Amulets, etc. being categories) regardless of the culture the objects came from. The museum still uses this display method, today, which means one can see a great many surprising things all gathered together, which encourages many visitors to think twice about their cultural biases.

PRM main court — You can explore further with this 360 interactive image

An exploration of everything would take days, but for a pilgrimage in search of Lyra, one should go towards the back right corner and find the display of arctic peoples from Siberia and Scandinavia that inspired Pullman to write about the North, including the same photo of Samoyed hunters that Lyra saw in the Subtle Knife. You can easily imagine Lyra wearing the child’s hooded reindeer skin coat with its brightly colored decorative trim. The waterproof seal intestine parkas are a marvel of indigenous technologies, and you can see details of the dog sleds and other equipment the Gyptians used to reach Bolvangar and save children the Gobblers stole. In another section, you can see the trepanation or trepanning tools both Lyra and Pullman saw.

Lyra’s Oxford

With every re-reading, there are more details to find in the books, just as with every visit, there is more to find in Oxford. I recommend a visit to “Bodley’s Library” or Bodleian’s Library as we call it in our world. They always have interesting exhibits highlighting treasures from their collections, and when I last visited the exhibit, appropriately enough, was called “Sappho to Suffrage: Women Who Dared.” Nothing could be more appropriate to view while musing on Lyra, and even calls to mind her mother, the deplorable Mrs. Coulter, for no one could deny they were both Women Who Dared. In their online exhibits, you can view an alethiometer from their collections, commissioned by Pullman himself.

The Museum of Science and History also holds a treasure trove of deliciously tactile scientific instruments from the 18th and 19th century, all gleaming gold and brass, delicate dials and cogs with more aesthetic satisfaction than most modern machines. You can imagine you are holding the warm weight of the alethiometer. The materiality of an object can make a fantastical world feel logically real, despite the daemons and talking bears.

While I did not have time to visit Lyra and Will’s bench in the botanical gardens (it was also not the right time of year to possibly meet them), I did stop by the Trout Inn, the main setting of La Belle Savage, the first book in the new Book of Dust trilogy. It’s a restaurant now, but the building is as much as the book describes, all old stone and fireplaces with a view onto the river and the ruins of the abbey, as if you arrived only a few months after the Great Flood that destroyed it and set Malcolm and Lyra on their journey to Jordan College.

Exploration

Much like the bustling education happening in Oxford, Pullman made these books to encourage people to learn how to think, how to gather information, and bring it all together with that final spark, the imagination (the dust), to come to your own opinions. Like Lyra, we must learn how to be an adult, that considers, rather than a child, who is all instinct.

So I challenge everyone to go forth and explore your local museum for anything that reminds you of Lyra’s world, and to think while you do. Why are these things on display? What does the museum say about them? How do you know they’re right? After your scavenger hunt, pick one thing and research it from home. How does the museum’s opinion compare to what you find? How did the objects get to the museum?

Activities and Tours

You could make a treasure hunt out of a trip to a museum. Lyra and her friends travelled so much that it wouldn’t be difficult to pick any larger survey museum – like the Met or the British Museum or the Ashmolean if you’re in Oxford – and see who could find more objects from the books, such as:

A clock or compass like the alethiometer
A knife like Will’s
A spyglass
A cat like Will’s daemon
A pine marten like Pantalaimon
Arctic survival gear
The northern lights
Fortune telling devices that speak to Dust
A polar bear like Iorek Byrnson
Witches like Serafina Pekkala
A hot air balloon like Lee Scorsby
An angel like poor Balthamos and Baruch

And if you are lucky enough to go to Oxford, here’s a bit of a His Dark Materials walking tour:

Bodley’s Library: Bodley’s Library features prominently in His Dark Materials and also features in the new book La Belle Sauvage.
The Covered Market: the market is a favorite haunt for Lyra and friends in Northern Lights.
The Trout Inn, Wolvercote: this real pub is where Malcolm lives with his parents, the landlords, in La Belle Sauvage.
Pitt Rivers Museum: Lyra and Will find skulls here with holes in them in The Subtle Knife.

Godstow Abbey: an abbey where the nuns look after the baby Lyra in La Belle Sauvage
Jericho: where Gyptians board boats in Northern Lights. It is also where the main character lives in La Belle Sauvage and where some of the action takes place.
Port Meadow: in Northern Lights, this is the site of the Horse Fair where the disappearance of a young boy ‘from a gyptian family she knew’ helps to trigger Lyra’s adventures. It’s referenced in the other His Dark Materials books and in La Belle Sauvage.
Botanic Gardens: In The Amber Spyglass, Lyra and Will promise to sit on the bench at the back of the Botanic Gardens for an hour at noon on Midsummer’s Day every year so that they may feel each other’s presence next to one another in their own worlds.