Inklings

Based on Wikipedia: Inklings

The Pub Where Middle-earth Was Born

Every Tuesday around midday, a group of Oxford professors would shuffle into a small pub called The Eagle and Child. The locals called it The Bird and Baby, or simply The Bird. The publican, Charlie Blagrove, would let them use his private parlour in the back, where they could talk without being overheard by students or colleagues. What they discussed in that little room would eventually reshape fantasy literature for the next century.

The men called themselves the Inklings.

At the heart of this group sat two friends whose names you almost certainly know: C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien. Lewis was working on stories about children who stumble through a wardrobe into a magical land. Tolkien was wrestling with something far stranger—a complete mythology for England, populated by hobbits, elves, and a dark lord who poured his malice into a golden ring.

They read their drafts aloud to each other. They argued. They criticized. They encouraged. The Lord of the Rings, all three volumes of it, was first heard not by millions of readers but by a handful of men in a cramped Oxford room, clouds of pipe smoke drifting toward the ceiling.

What Exactly Was an Inkling?

Warren Lewis, C. S. Lewis's brother and a member of the group, tried to explain it once:

"Properly speaking, 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."

This is an important distinction. Oxford in the 1930s and 1940s was thick with formal societies. There were clubs for everything—debating, dining, reading poetry, discussing philosophy. Each had officers, minutes, membership rolls. The Inklings had none of these. You didn't apply to join. You were simply invited, and then you kept coming back if you fit.

What bound them together was a shared conviction that narrative mattered. They believed stories weren't mere entertainment or escapism. Stories were how humans made sense of existence. And fantasy—the kind involving magic and myth and worlds that never existed—could reveal truths that realistic fiction often missed.

This was not a popular view in academic circles. Literary criticism in their era was moving toward formalism and eventually structuralism, approaches that dissected texts like specimens and treated narrative pleasure with suspicion. The Inklings swam against this current.

The Thursday Night Readings

The pub gatherings on Tuesdays were informal, social, conversational. But the serious work happened on Thursday evenings in C. S. Lewis's rooms at Magdalen College.

These were reading sessions. Someone would bring pages—a chapter, a story, a fragment—and read them aloud while the others listened. Then came the criticism.

Not gentle criticism.

Tolkien famously struggled with this. He was touchy about his work and sometimes bristled at suggestions. Lewis, by contrast, thrived on the feedback. He could take harsh criticism, revise accordingly, and return the next week with improved pages. Their friendship endured despite these temperamental differences, though it would eventually cool for reasons having little to do with literature.

Some of what was read in those Thursday sessions became classics. Out of the Silent Planet, the first book in Lewis's Space Trilogy, debuted there. So did All Hallows' Eve by Charles Williams, a strange and mystical novel about ghosts in London. And week after week, year after year, Tolkien read the slowly accumulating pages of his epic about a hobbit named Frodo.

Not everything was serious. The Inklings had a tradition of reading from the works of Amanda McKittrick Ros, an Irish writer whose prose was legendarily, spectacularly, almost heroically bad. They held competitions to see who could read her sentences aloud the longest without breaking into laughter. No one lasted very long.

The Unlikely Third Pillar

If you only know Lewis and Tolkien, you're missing a crucial figure: Charles Williams.

Williams was strange. Where Lewis was hearty and argumentative, where Tolkien was meticulous and scholarly, Williams was mystical, intense, and difficult to pin down. He wrote what scholars now call "supernatural thrillers"—novels where the Holy Grail might show up in modern London, or where the Platonic archetypes become literally real. His poetry was dense and liturgical. His personality was magnetic and unsettling.

Lewis adored him. Tolkien found him harder to take.

Williams worked as an editor at Oxford University Press, which relocated to Oxford during World War Two to escape the German bombing of London. This accident of wartime geography brought him into the Inklings' orbit. He died in 1945, shortly after the war ended, at only fifty-seven. Lewis was devastated.

Williams's influence on Lewis was profound, visible in books like That Hideous Strength and The Great Divorce. His influence on Tolkien was negligible to nonexistent. Tolkien later admitted he never really understood Williams's novels.

Owen Barfield and the Fourth Chair

There's a fourth name that belongs in the inner circle, though he rarely made it to the meetings: Owen Barfield.

Barfield was a London solicitor—what Americans would call a lawyer—so he couldn't easily pop over to Oxford on Tuesday lunch or Thursday evening. But he and Lewis had been friends since their undergraduate days, and their friendship was intellectual dynamite.

They called it the Great War.

Not the actual war—they'd both served in the trenches of World War One—but a years-long argument about the nature of imagination, language, and truth. Barfield was an Anthroposophist, a follower of the Austrian mystic Rudolf Steiner. He believed that human consciousness had evolved over millennia and that ancient people experienced reality in fundamentally different ways than we do. Lewis was a skeptic who demanded logical argument.

They wrote letters. They wrote essays. They argued in person whenever they could. Lewis later said that Barfield was the friend who had most influenced his thinking, which is remarkable given how famous Lewis's friendship with Tolkien became.

Barfield outlived them all. He died in 1997 at the age of ninety-nine, the last of the core Inklings, a living link to that smoky Thursday room for decades after everyone else had gone.

The Supporting Cast

Beyond the inner four, the Inklings included an assortment of Oxford dons, students, and occasional visitors.

Warren Lewis, called "Warnie," was C. S. Lewis's older brother. He was a retired army officer who became an expert on seventeenth-century French history. He lived with his brother at The Kilns, their Oxford home, and was present at nearly every gathering. He kept diaries that later became invaluable records of what the Inklings actually said and did.

Hugo Dyson was a Shakespeare scholar, boisterous and theatrical. He performed rather than read. Tolkien found him increasingly difficult as the years went on—Dyson would loudly interrupt the Lord of the Rings readings with complaints that he couldn't take any more elves. "Not another elf!" he would groan. This eventually contributed to Tolkien reading less and less to the group.

Christopher Tolkien, J. R. R.'s son, sometimes attended. He would later devote his life to editing and publishing his father's unfinished works, spending decades assembling The Silmarillion and the twelve volumes of The History of Middle-earth from boxes of handwritten pages.

Visitors drifted in and out. Roy Campbell, the South African poet, came when he was in Oxford. E. R. Eddison, author of The Worm Ouroboros, visited. Dorothy L. Sayers, the mystery writer and Dante translator, was a friend of Lewis's but never became an Inkling—partly because, as Warren Lewis's description makes clear, the Inklings were all male. This was typical for Oxford groups of their era, though it now seems a notable limitation.

Origins and Endings

The name "Inklings" didn't start with Lewis and Tolkien.

Around 1931, an undergraduate named Edward Tangye Lean started a club at University College, Oxford, for reading unfinished compositions aloud. He called it the Inklings—a pun suggesting both people who dabble in ink and people who have inklings, vague intimations of ideas not yet fully formed. Tolkien and Lewis were among the dons who attended.

When Lean graduated in 1933, his club dissolved. But Lewis and Tolkien kept the name for their own gatherings at Magdalen. As Tolkien later put it, their habit of reading aloud "would in fact have come into being at that time, whether the original short-lived club had ever existed or not."

The Inklings flourished through the 1930s and the war years. But by the late 1940s, the group was fraying.

Charles Williams was dead. Tolkien had stopped reading The Lord of the Rings to the group. Lewis and Tolkien themselves were drifting apart—Lewis's marriage to Joy Davidman, his increasing fame from the Narnia books, and small accumulated irritations had cooled their friendship. The Thursday readings petered out around 1949.

The Tuesday pub gatherings continued longer, well into the 1960s, but they became more social and less literary. The creative ferment had passed.

Beer Shortages and Borrowed Rooms

During World War Two, rationing and shortages disrupted even the most basic routines. There were times when The Eagle and Child simply couldn't open because there was no beer to serve.

When this happened, the Inklings would migrate to other pubs: the White Horse, the King's Arms. The group adapted. They kept meeting.

In 1962, long after the Thursday readings had ended, the publican removed the wall separating Charlie Blagrove's private parlour from the main bar. The room where Frodo's journey was first heard aloud became just another section of an ordinary pub. Today a plaque commemorates the Inklings' presence, and tourists seek out the spot, but the actual physical space has been absorbed into something more commercial.

The Archive at Wheaton

If you want to see the original documents—the letters, the manuscripts, the photographs—you have to go to Wheaton, Illinois.

This might seem strange. Why would the papers of English Oxford professors end up at a small Christian college in the American Midwest?

The Marion E. Wade Center at Wheaton College began collecting materials related to Lewis and his circle in the 1960s, when such things could still be acquired relatively cheaply. Clyde Kilby, an English professor at Wheaton, was an early Lewis enthusiast who recognized the scholarly significance of preserving these materials. He befriended the aging Inklings and their families, who donated or sold papers to the center.

Today the Wade Center holds substantial collections related to Lewis, Tolkien, Williams, and Barfield. There are letters between Lewis and his brother, manuscripts of unpublished works, audio recordings, and boxes of related materials. It's become a pilgrimage site for scholars and devoted readers.

The Mythopoeic Society

In 1967, an American named Glen GoodKnight founded an organization devoted to the kind of literature the Inklings loved. He called it the Mythopoeic Society.

The word mythopoeic means "myth-making"—it comes from Greek roots meaning "myth" and "to make." The society focuses on literature that creates secondary worlds, that builds mythology, that takes fantasy seriously as art rather than dismissing it as escapism.

The society publishes a journal called Mythlore and hosts annual conferences. It gives out awards for fantasy literature: the Mythopoeic Fantasy Awards for Adult Literature and Children's Literature, among others. Previous winners have included Ursula K. Le Guin, Patricia McKillip, and Susanna Clarke.

There's also a peer-reviewed academic journal specifically about the Inklings, called, straightforwardly enough, the Journal of Inklings Studies. It was founded in 2011 and is published by Edinburgh University Press. If you want to read scholarly arguments about whether Tolkien's cosmology contradicts Williams's theology, or how Lewis's conversion influenced his fiction, this is where such articles appear.

The Inklings in Fiction

The Inklings have themselves become characters in stories.

James A. Owen's fantasy series The Chronicles of the Imaginarium Geographica casts Tolkien, Lewis, and Williams as protagonists. The series imagines that they were guardians of a magical atlas that maps all the lands of human imagination. Warren Lewis and Hugo Dyson appear as supporting characters. The third novel, The Indigo King, explicitly addresses the founding of the Inklings as an organization.

This is a peculiar kind of literary afterlife: the writers who championed mythmaking have themselves been mythologized. They've become characters in the kind of fantastic narratives they once defended.

What They Left Behind

The Inklings existed for perhaps two decades. They published no manifestos. They issued no journals. They left no formal records except what individual members happened to write in letters and diaries.

And yet.

The Narnia books have sold over one hundred million copies. The Lord of the Rings has sold one hundred fifty million and was adapted into films that grossed nearly three billion dollars. Tolkien's mythology inspired Dungeons and Dragons, which inspired video games, which shaped how millions of people think about fantasy. Lewis's popular theology, particularly Mere Christianity and The Screwtape Letters, has shaped Protestant thought for generations. Williams's novels, though less famous, influenced writers like T. S. Eliot and W. H. Auden.

This was not a famous literary movement like Modernism or the Beats. There was no salon, no little magazine, no public declarations. Just some friends meeting in a pub and an Oxford study, reading to each other, arguing, encouraging.

It's worth considering what made the Inklings work.

They were not identical. Tolkien was Catholic; Lewis was Anglican; Williams was high church bordering on mystical; Barfield was Anthroposophist. Tolkien was slow and perfectionist; Lewis was fast and prolific. Williams was strange in ways the others never quite grasped. They disagreed about each other's work. Tolkien didn't much care for Narnia. Lewis found parts of The Lord of the Rings tedious.

But they shared a conviction: that storytelling was serious, that fantasy was not frivolous, that myth and fairy tale touched something deep and true about human existence. They gave each other permission to write the books they wanted to write, in an academic environment that often dismissed such work as childish or unserious.

They also gave each other audiences. Writing is lonely. Reading your work aloud to friends who care—who will tell you when it doesn't work but also celebrate when it does—is a gift that most writers never receive.

The Inklings were that gift for each other. And what they made, encouraged by those Thursday evenings and Tuesday lunches, reshaped the imagination of the world.