J.R.R. Tolkien by Humphrey Carpenter;J.R.R. Tolkien;

Author:Humphrey Carpenter;J.R.R. Tolkien; [Carpenter, Humphrey]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)
Published: 1982-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

Lewis and Tolkien continued to see much of each other. Tolkien read aloud to Lewis from The Silmarillion, and Lewis urged him to press on and finish writing it. Tolkien later said of this: ‘The unpayable debt that I owe to him was not “influence” as it is ordinarily understood, but sheer encouragement. He was for long my only audience. Only from him did I ever get the idea that my “stuff” could be more than a private hobby.’

Lewis’s conversion to Christianity marked the beginning of a new stage in his friendship with Tolkien. From the early nineteen-thirties onwards the two men depended less exclusively on each other’s company and more on that of other men. In The Four Loves Lewis states that ‘two, far from being the necessary number for Friendship, is not even the best’, and he suggests that each friend added to a group brings out some special characteristic in the others. Tolkien had experienced this in the T.C.B.S.; and the knot of friends which now began to come together was the ultimate expression of the T.C.B.S. principle, the ‘clubbable’ urge which Tolkien had felt since those adolescent days. This group was known as The Inklings.

It began to form itself at about the time (in the early nineteen-thirties) when the Coalbiters ceased to meet, having fulfilled their aim of reading all the principal Icelandic sagas and finally the Elder Edda. ‘The Inklings’ was originally the name of a literary society founded in about 1931 by a University College undergraduate named Tangye Lean. Lewis and Tolkien both attended its meetings, at which unpublished compositions were read and criticised. After Lean left Oxford the club lived on; or rather its name was transferred half jestingly to the circle of friends who gathered at regular intervals around Lewis.

The Inklings have now entered literary history, and a good deal has been written about them, much of it over-solemn. They were no more (and no less) than a number of friends, all of whom were male and Christian, and most of whom were interested in literature. Numbers of people have been stated to have been ‘members’ at this or that period, whereas in truth there was no system of membership. Some men attended more or less regularly at various periods, while others were only occasional visitors. Lewis was the invariable nucleus, without whom any gathering would have been inconceivable. A list of other names gives little idea of what the Inklings really were; but if names matter, besides Lewis and Tolkien (who was almost invariably present) among those who attended in the years before and during the war were Major Warren Lewis (C. S. Lewis’s brother, known as ‘Warnie’), R. E. Havard (an Oxford doctor who attended the Lewis and Tolkien households), Lewis’s long-standing friend Owen Barfield (although, being a London solicitor, Barfield rarely came to meetings), and Hugo Dyson.

It was a thoroughly casual business. One should not imagine that the same people turned up week after week, or sent apologies if they were to be absent.

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