Inklings

The New Building at Magdalen College. The Inklings met in C. S. Lewis's rooms, above the arcade on the right side of the central block.

The Inklings were an informal literary discussion group associated with J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis at the University of Oxford for nearly two decades between the early 1930s and late 1949. The Inklings were literary enthusiasts who praised the value of narrative in fiction and encouraged the writing of fantasy. The best-known, apart from Tolkien and Lewis, were Charles Williams, and (although a Londoner) Owen Barfield.

Members

The Eagle and Child pub (commonly known as the Bird and Baby or simply just the Bird) in Oxford where the Inklings met informally on Tuesday mornings during term.

The more regular members of the Inklings, many of them academics at the university, included:

• Owen Barfield
• Lord David Cecil
• Hugo Dyson
• Adam Fox
• Robert Havard (Lewis's and Tolkien's doctor, dubbed "Useless Quack" by Warren Lewis)
• C. S. Lewis
• Warren Lewis (C. S. Lewis's elder brother)
• J. R. R. Tolkien
• Christopher Tolkien (J. R. R. Tolkien's son)
• Charles Williams

Less frequent visitors included:

• Nevill Coghill
• James Dundas-Grant
• Colin Hardie
• Gervase Mathew
• R. B. McCallum
• Courtenay Edward Stevens
• John Wain
• Charles Leslie Wrenn
• George Temple

Guests included:

• Roy Campbell
• E. R. Eddison

Meetings

A corner of The Eagle and Child pub, formerly the landlord's sitting-room where Lewis's friends, including Inklings members, informally gathered on Tuesday mornings. There is a small display of memorabilia.

"Properly speaking," wrote Warren Lewis, "the Inklings was neither a club nor a literary society, though it partook of the nature of both. There were no rules, officers, agendas, or formal elections." As was typical for university groups in their time and place, the Inklings were all male. Readings and discussions of the members' unfinished works were the principal purposes of meetings. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, Lewis's Out of the Silent Planet, and Williams's All Hallows' Eve were among the novels first read to the Inklings. Tolkien's fictional Notion Club (see "Sauron Defeated") was based on the Inklings. Meetings were not all serious; the Inklings amused themselves by having competitions to see who could read the notoriously bad prose of Amanda McKittrick Ros for the longest without laughing.

The name was associated originally with a society of Oxford University's University College, initiated by the then undergraduate Edward Tangye Lean around 1931, for the purpose of reading aloud unfinished compositions. The society consisted of students and dons, among them Tolkien and Lewis. When Lean left Oxford in 1933, the society ended, and Tolkien and Lewis transferred its name to their group at Magdalen College. On the association between the two 'Inklings' societies, Tolkien later said "although our habit was to read aloud compositions of various kinds (and lengths!), this association and its habit would in fact have come into being at that time, whether the original short-lived club had ever existed or not."

Until late 1949, Inklings readings and discussions were usually held on Thursday evenings in C. S. Lewis's rooms at Magdalen. The Inklings and friends also gathered informally on Tuesdays at midday at a local public house, The Eagle and Child, familiarly and alliteratively known in the Oxford community as The Bird and Baby, or simply The Bird. The publican, Charlie Blagrove, let Lewis and friends use his private parlour for privacy; the wall and door separating it from the public bar were removed in 1962. During the war years, beer shortages occasionally rendered the Eagle and Child unable to open and the group instead met at other pubs, including the White Horse and the Kings Arms.

Legacy

The Marion E. Wade Center, at Wheaton College, Illinois, has holdings on the Inklings Owen Barfield, C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien and Charles Williams. These include letters, manuscripts, audio and video tapes, artwork, dissertations, periodicals, photographs, and related materials. It publishes the journal VII: Journal of the Marion E. Wade Center on Inklings topics. The Mythopoeic Society, with its journal Mythlore, is a literary organization devoted to the study of mythopoeic literature, particularly the works of J. R. R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, and Charles Williams; it was founded by Glen GoodKnight in 1967 and incorporated as a non-profit organization in 1971. A journal that focuses specifically on the Inklings is Journal of Inklings Studies (founded in 2011).

In fiction

Three of the best-known members of the Inklings – Tolkien, Lewis, and Williams – are the main characters of James A. Owen's fantasy series, The Chronicles of the Imaginarium Geographica, while Warren Lewis and Hugo Dyson are recurring minor characters throughout the series. The existence and founding of the organization are also alluded to in the third novel, The Indigo King.

Sources

• Carpenter, Humphrey (1979). The Inklings: C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, Charles Williams and Their Friends. Houghton Mifflin. ISBN 0-395-27628-4.
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• Glyer, Diana Pavlac (2007). The Company They Keep: C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien as Writers in Community. Kent State University Press. ISBN 978-0-87338-890-0.
• Kilby, Clyde S.; Mead, Marjorie Lamp, eds. (1982). Brothers and Friends: The Diaries of Major Warren Hamilton Lewis. San Francisco: Harper & Row. ISBN 0-06-064575-X.

Further reading

• Duriez, Colin; Porter, David (2001). The Inklings Handbook: The Lives, Thought and Writings of CS Lewis, JRR Tolkien, Charles Williams, Owen Barfield, and their Friends. Azure. ISBN 1-902694-13-9.
• Duriez, Colin (2003). Tolkien and CS Lewis: The Gift of Friendship. Paulist Press. ISBN 1-58768-026-2.
• Glyer, Diana Pavlac (2015). Bandersnatch: CS Lewis, JRR Tolkien, and the Creative Collaboration of the Inklings. Kent State University Press. ISBN 9781606352762.
• Knight, Gareth (October 2010). The Magical World of the Inklings. Barfield, Owen (foreword) (new & expanded ed.). Skylight. ISBN 978-1-908011-01-5.
• Segura, Eduardo; Honegger, Thomas, eds. (2007). Myth and Magic: Art According to the Inklings. Walking Tree Publishers. ISBN 978-3-905703-08-5.
• Zaleski, Philip; Zaleski, Carol (2015). The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings: J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Owen Barfield, Charles Williams. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. ISBN 978-0374154097.

External links

• Journal of Inklings Studies. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press., peer-reviewed & academic.
• "Further Up and Further In". Archived from the original on 2 March 2013. Retrieved 8 December 2008., a CS Lewis and Inklings resource blog.
• "An Inklings bibliography". The Mythopoeic Society. Archived from the original on 23 September 2008. Retrieved 8 June 2010..
• "Inklings gesellschaft" [Inklings Society] (in Deutsch).
• "Marion E. Wade Center" (research collection). Wheaton.
• "Inklings". The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.