Inklings Info

Welcome to Inklings Info, your source for the latest news about J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, and other members of the celebrated circle of Oxford writers!

Who Are the Inklings?

The Inklings were an informal society of writers centered around Oxford University in England. The group included many writers during its existence; only the best known are profiled here.

C.S. Lewis (1898-1963) was the original organizer of the Inklings, and the group met regularly in his rooms at Magdalen College, Oxford. A professor of medieval and Renaissance literature at Oxford (and later Cambridge), his worldwide reputation rests primarily on his work in two areas: imaginative literature and Christian apologetics, categories that for Lewis were complementary. His best known works in the first category include his Space Trilogy, The Screwtape Letters, The Great Divorce, and the seven-volume Chronicles of Narnia. Among his most prominent works in the second category are Mere Christianity, The Problem of Pain, and Miracles.

J.R.R. Tolkien (1892-1973) was also a professor of medieval literature at Oxford and a close personal friend of C.S. Lewis for many years. Apart from his scholarly writings, he spent decades creating and refining a mythic pre-history for Europe (“Middle-Earth”). Two of these stories, The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, are among the most widely read books of the twentieth century; The Lord of the Rings was voted the greatest novel of the twentieth century in numerous polls conducted around the year 2000. Tolkien’s son Christopher published more of his father’s stories of Middle-Earth, such as The Silmarillion and The Children of Hurin, in the years following Tolkien’s death. During his lifetime Tolkien published other widely read fairy stories as well, including “Leaf by Niggle,” “Smith of Wootton Major,” and “Farmer Giles of Ham.”

Charles Williams (1886-1945) served as an editor for Oxford University Press for several decades. He also established a reputation for himself as a prominent novelist in the 1930s with works–such as War in Heaven and The Place of the Lion–that often featured supernatural occurrences or the discovery of mystical artifacts in the modern world. Many great British authors, including W.H. Auden and T.S. Eliot (who wrote an introduction to one of Williams’s books), admired these novels, and C.S. Lewis became one of Williams’s biggest fans in the mid-1930s. When Williams was relocated from London to Oxford after World War II began, he joined the Inklings and met with them regularly.

Owen Barfield (1898-1997) was a solicitor who also contributed important ideas to the fields of philosophy, religion, and poetry. T.S. Eliot, C.S. Lewis, and J.R.R. Tolkien all acknowledged being influenced by his writings. In particular, Barfield’s views of the function of myth and the truth that often lies behind it were instrumental in Lewis’s conversion to Christianity.

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The works of these authors are as relevant and well loved today as when they were first published. Interest in them only seems to grow over time. New articles, books, documentaries, and adaptations of their works are popping up all over the place.

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Sincerely,

The Inklings Info Team