The Inklings: C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, Charles Williams, and their Friends

by Humphrey Carpenter

Paperback, 1981

Status

Available

Call number

823.912

Genres

Collection

Gifts

Publication

Ballantine Books (1981), Edition: 1st Ballantine Books Edition, 256 pages

Description

Critically acclaimed, award-winning biography of CS Lewis, JRR Tolkien and the brilliant group of writers to come out of Oxford during the Second World War. C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien and their friends were a regular feature of the Oxford scenery in the years during and after the Second World War. They drank beer on Tuesdays at the 'Bird and Baby', and on Thursday nights they met in Lewis' Magdalen College rooms to read aloud from the books they were writing; jokingly they called themselves 'The Inklings'. C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien first introduced The Screwtape Letters and The Lord of the Rings to an audience in this company and Charles Williams, poet and writer of supernatural thrillers, was another prominent member of the group. Humphrey Carpenter, who wrote the acclaimed biography of J.R.R. Tolkien, draws upon unpublished letters and diaries, to which he was given special access, in this engrossing story.… (more)

User reviews

LibraryThing member jburlinson

In some ways, this feels like a pendant to Carpenter's then recently published (1977) J.R.R. Tolkien: A Biography. Whenever a biographer casts his net to catch the big tuna, he inevitably hauls in some smaller fish as well. What to do? Throw them back? Certainly not, when there is an audience out

there eager to get better acquainted with the more exotic crustaceans. So this book puts the focus on the other figures in the "charmed ring" named the Inklings -- primarily C.S. Lewis and, to a lesser extent, Charles Williams. But the others are not neglected -- Havard, Dyson, Barfield, and Lewis' brother, Warnie, who, among all the more celebrated names in this proto-book club, perhaps wrote the single most entertaining book of the bunch: The Splendid Century: Life in the France of Louis XIV . Carpenter, as usual, is the model biographer and his central chapter, in which he reconstructs a “typical” session of the discussion group from memoirs, correspondence and other writings, is just choice.

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LibraryThing member AlexTheHunn

Insights into the relationships of Oxford professors who produces some of the most enjoyable fantasy literature of the middle twentieth century.

LibraryThing member mbmackay

A group biography, of C. S. Lewis, Tolkien and others who made up the informal Oxford group known as the Inklings. Carpenter is also the biographer of Tolkien, and he runs a gentle touch over each of these. Between the lines, they seem a very atypical bunch – highly conservative, loudly Christian

and women-hating, or at least women-ignoring bunch. C. S. Lewis comes across as repressedly gay, but maybe he was just tormented by his upbringing, which included being dumped, as a young boy, as a boarder in a British ‘public’ school. An informative book, in the end, somehow dissatisfying. Read November 2008

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LibraryThing member Chris_El

Really liked it.

It is a biography of C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, and Charles Williams and it dabbles into the story of the people that joined them for their Inkling meetings.

Lewis was the person that really pulled the group together so the book does focus on him in the beginning and end. I grew

to like Williams more towards the end of the book but his beliefs were an odd mix of mysticism and Christianity. It was pointed out that some of life was walled off from the Inklings so the reader gets a fuller opportunity to judge him than Lewis and Tolkien did. Tolkien did not care much for Williams and this led to a cooling of friendship between Lewis and Tolkien. Which was a shame.

It's worth noting that Tolkien said that Lewis's gift of encouragement was the only thing that kept him writing for years. Without Lewis it is possible we never would have had the Lord of the Rings.

Lewis and Tolkein did have different views on some subjects within their faith. But, this did not stop them from seeing the value in the good each followed.

The best and most attractive thing about this book was the story of friendship and how the group met frequently and celebrated their shared passions in their own community around story, good food and drink, tobacco, and friendship. It's a wonderful life.

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LibraryThing member drjwsimmons

Fascinating. I am learning a lot that I did not know.

LibraryThing member Herenya

Carpenter states that this "book is largely concerned with C.S. Lewis; for, as I have argued in it, the Inklings owned their existence as a group almost entirely to him." It's a reasonable argument to make: The Inklings' Thursday meetings were held in Lewis' rooms at Magdelen College, and Lewis was

responsible for the inclusion of several other regular Inklings: his brother Warnie, for one, and Charles Williams for another.
Tolkien and Williams are both mentioned in the book's subtitle, but Carpenter had already written about Tolkien's life in J.R.R. Tolkien: A biography, and as Williams was only in Oxford during WWII, his involvement and influence was more limited. Therefore The Inklings is framed by Lewis' life; it begins with Lewis as a young boy and ends with his death.

Nonetheless, it is also a biography of a group of friends. Carpenter looks at the other labels one might give the Inklings and shows that "friends" is the only one which fits perfectly. (They had things in common - Oxford, Christianity, attitudes to literature - but even then, these things defined each of them in different ways. And they were not all academics or even writers.) Both of these focuses, Lewis and friendship, go hand-in-hand; Lewis valued his friendships very highly and they had a huge influence on his life.

I like the approach Carpenter takes - it is intelligent, informative and carefully researched. He constantly quotes the Inklings themselves - mostly things they wrote in letters or diaries (and provides an appendix of sources. After the internet's relaxed attitude to providing formal citations, I found this refreshing). He also writes about the Inklings as if they were real people: they have prejudices and inconsistencies and mysteries which even a careful biographer cannot conclusively answer.
By the time Carpenter spends a chapter imagining the conversation at an Thursday night meeting of the Inklings, it is clear that Carpenter knows his subjects - their relationships, their opinions and the sorts of conversations they had - very well. "Thursday evenings" is delightfully plausible and ultimately does not pretend to be anything more than what it is: an artificial reconstruction which attempts to catch "the flavour of those Thursday evenings" rather than provide an completely factual account.

I found the The Inklings to be absolutely fascinating. And then I had to read J.R.R. Tolkien: a biography.

(I wrote a longer version of this review, which includes quotes, here.)

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LibraryThing member Steve_Walker

This is the definitive biography of the Inklings. Carpenter does a wonderful job giving the story of the group and the stages of their evolution.

LibraryThing member DarthDeverell

Humphrey Carpenter’s The Inklings: C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, Charles Williams and Their Friends recounts the Oxford University literary club whose members included J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Owen Barfield, among many others, that met at the Eagle and Child Pub between the

early 1930s and late 1949. The work, like Carpenter’s biography of Tolkien, examines the men’s work as well as the significance of the place. Carpenter ultimately concludes that C.S. Lewis was key to the Inklings’ existence. He writes, “…the Inklings were just one more Oxford club. Yet they were certainly more than that to Jack Lewis” (pg. 161). Even R.E. Havard concluded that the club was “simply a group of C.S.L.’s wide circle of friends who lived near enough to him to meet together fairly regularly” and that many later historians take them “much more seriously than [they] took [themselves]” (pg. 161). As to literary influence, Carpenter argues that Lewis “alone can be said to have been ‘influenced’ by the others (he was as Tolkien said ‘an impressionable man’), but for the rest it is sufficient to say that they came together because they already agreed about certain things” (pg. 160). Tolkien also referred to the group as “the Lewis séance” (pg. 171). Carpenter’s The Inklings is great literary biography for scholars of Lewis’ and Williams’ work, though he spends less time on Tolkien having already written a biography of Tolkien.

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