Pitt Rivers

The Pitt Rivers Museum's exotic objects continue to fascinate us as much as they did the Victorians who first collected them.

Author Philip Pullman used the museum's collection's as inspiration for aspects of the His Dark Materials trilogy, notably the "Alethiometer" device shown here by cast members of a play based on one of the novels. For more information on the alethiometer, please click here.

Let the last word here go to the poets; especially Tian Yi Zheng, who won a commendation in the 12-16 category of the competition. Musing on a mysterious Indian dagger's magic, she wrote:

I read: pick crutch, concealed dagger.
The handle unscrewed, shining blade revealed.
It makes me wonder (...)
How can it be trapped in a case?
Is it waiting, biding its time?

Source of quotation: James Fenton, "The Pitt-Rivers Museum, Oxford", in The Memory of War. Poems 1968-1982 (Edinburgh: The Salamander Press, 1982), 71Source of images: "Alethiometer due" from The National Theatre, "His Dark Materials", http://stagework.org.uk/webdav/servlet/XRM?Page/@id=6007&Session/@id=D_fxhVF58y1E3vywDBDR6n&Section/@id=133; Extracts from Tian Yi Zheng, "Musings on an Indian Weapon," http://www.prm.ox.ac.uk/poetry2.html

Harry Potter movie fans have seen one of the Museum's shrunken heads in the Knight Bus scenes of "The Prisoner of Askaban." For a virtual tour of this case and other parts of the Museum, click here.

In 1982, James Fenton published "The Pitt-Rivers Museum, Oxford" as a tribute to the mysterious, magical qualities of the artefacts he remembered seeing as a child. He and others have read poetry at the museum, and in 2003 the results of a writing competition for visitors were announced on National Poetry Day.