Philip and Carol Zaleski have given us a great gift with their painstaking research on each of the major inklings (J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams and Owen Barfield) and how their lives and writings intertwined. The name “Inklings”, according to Tolkien, was little more than a “pleasantly ingenious pun suggesting people with vague or half-formed intimations and ideas, plus those who dabble in ink.” But History would record that, however modest their pretensions, their inkblots were no mere dabblings.
The group came together at a strategic time. WWI had left many in despair, but in others it had instilled a longing to reclaim the goodness, beauty, and cultural continuity that had been so violently disrupted. The Inklings came together because they shared that longing; they believed, as did their literary and spiritual ancestors, that ours is a fallen world yet not a forsaken one, which was a belief that set them at odds with many of their contemporaries. Lewis described the Inklings to Williams as “a group of Christians who like to write.” The Zaleskis add that they shared more common characteristics than that including intellectual vivacity, love of myth, conservative politics, memories of war, and a passion for beef, beer, and verbal battle.
The book highlights the idiosyncrasies of each member of the group beginning with Tolkien’s rapid, slurring, unintelligible lectures, which students endured because, as one student remarked, “Tolkien could turn a lecture into a mead hall in which he was the bard and we were the feasting, listening guest. Speaking in Anglo-Saxon turned Tolkien’s leaden tongue to gold.” I was particularly interested in the details of Charles Williams' life because of C.S. Lewis' glowing accounts of him in his letters. The Zaleski's paint quite a different picture of him as a very strange man!
They also describe
the periodic friction between the members, particularly Tolkien’s impatience with
Williams because he disliked William’s fiction, but also because he distrusted
Williams’ fascination with the occult. Lewis and Barfield disagreed often (and
strongly) on the principles of anthroposophy. At times Tolkien and Lewis clashed
in their literary views, but their friendship endured through the decades. When
Lewis died, Tolkien wrote, “So far I have felt the normal feelings of a man of
my age – like an old tree that is losing all its leaves one by one, but this
feels like an axe-blow near the roots.”
Of course,
in 500 pages, you are bound to find lots more information (trivia?) than in other
books. It was fun to read that some of the early reviews of The Lord of the
Rings called it “juvenile trash” and “an overgrown fairy story” (!)
According
to the Zaleskis, By the time the last inkling passed away on the eve of the 21st
century, the group had altered, in large or small measure, the course of
imaginative literature, Christian theology and philosophy, comparative
mythology, and the scholarly study of the Beowulf author, of Dante, Spenser,
Milton, courtly love, fairy tale, and epic; and drawing as much from their
scholarship as from their experiences of a catastrophic century, they had
fashioned a new narrative of hope amid the ruins of war, industrialization, cultural
disintegration, skepticism, and anomie.
For three months this was my bed-time book, and it brought me many hours of pleasure.
Blessings,
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