Inklings

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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. 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 Owen Barfield.

Members

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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.

• Owen Barfield
• Jack A. W. Bennett
• Lord David Cecil
• Nevill Coghill
• James Dundas-Grant
• Hugo Dyson
• Adam Fox
• Colin Hardie
• Robert Havard
• C. S. Lewis
• Warren Lewis (C. S. Lewis's elder brother)
• R. B. McCallum
• Gervase Mathew
• Courtenay Edward Stevens
• Christopher Tolkien (J. R. R. Tolkien's son)
• J. R. R. Tolkien
• John Wain
• Charles Williams
• Charles Leslie Wrenn

Guests included:

• Roy Campbell
• E. R. Eddison

Meetings

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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.

"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 own group. 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 College, although occasionally at J.R.R. Tolkien's rooms at Merton College. Members of the Inklings and other 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, published by Edinburgh University Press, 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

• Template:ME-ref/LETTERS

External links

• , peer-reviewed & academic.
• , a CS Lewis and Inklings resource blog.
• .