The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings (82 page)

In any event, the dispute over the exact nature of the Inklings—cabal or club?—has faded as history has stepped in with a third alternative: that whatever the Inklings may have been during their most clubbable years, today they constitute a major literary force, a movement of sorts. As symbol, inspiration, guide, and rallying cry, the Inklings grow more influential each year. This acclamation has led to much grinding of teeth, not least because the Inklings never achieved the formal brilliance of the greatest of their contemporaries, such as Joyce, Woolf, Nabokov, Borges, or Eliot.

The Australian critic Germaine Greer famously declared that “it has been my nightmare that Tolkien would turn out to be the most influential writer of the twentieth century. The bad dream has materialized … The books that come in Tolkien’s train are more or less what you would expect; flight from reality is their dominating characteristic.” And much to the chagrin of those who share Greer’s viewpoint, the books and spin-offs of various kinds that come in the Inklings’ train are legion. Without the Inklings there would be no Dungeons and Dragons (and the whole universe of online fantasy role-playing it produced), no Harry Potter, no Philip Pullman (in his role as the anti-Lewis). Hollywood, the voice and arbiter of popular culture, has shifted dramatically toward mythopoeic tales; this is widely recognized to be the legacy of Tolkien, whose influence was disseminated by the sixties (“Frodo Lives!”) drug culture, itself a neo-Romantic movement that soon overflowed its banks.

Fan fiction, derivative fantasy novels, and sophomoric imitations aside, it is plain that Tolkien has unleashed a mythic awakening and Lewis a Christian awakening. Tolkien fans are often surprised to discover that they have entered a Christian cosmos as well as a world of Elves and Hobbits; fans of Lewis’s apologetic writings, on the other hand, are often discomfited when they learn about their hero’s personal life, his relationship with Mrs. Moore, his hearty appetite for drink and ribaldry, and his enduring affection for the pagan and planetary gods. But Tolkien’s mythology was deeply Christian and therefore had an organic order to it; and Lewis’s Christian awakening was deeply mythopoeic and therefore had an element of spontaneity and beauty often missing from conventional apologetics.

The Inklings’ work, then, taken as a whole, has a significance that far outweighs any measure of popularity, amounting to a revitalization of Christian intellectual and imaginative life. They were twentieth-century Romantics who championed imagination as the royal road to insight and the “medieval model” as an answer to modern confusion and anomie; yet they were for the most part Romantics without rebellion, fantasists who prized reason, for whom Fa
ë
rie was a habitat for the virtues and literature a sanctuary for faith. Even when they were not on speaking terms, they were at work on a shared project, to reclaim for contemporary life what Lewis called the “discarded image” of a universe created, ordered, and shot through with meaning.

Lewis’s work was all of a piece: as literary scholar, fantasist, and apologist, he was ever on a path of rehabilitation and recovery. Tolkien, like Lewis, claimed to be a living anachronism—“I am in fact a
Hobbit
(in all but size)”—but anyone who troubles to create new languages and surround them with new myths for the sake of reenchanting English literature can hardly be accused of living in the past. In his fiction, Charles Williams reclaimed mysterious, numinous objects—the Holy Grail, the Stone of Suleiman, a Tarot deck, Platonic archetypes—from past epochs and relocated them in modern England to demonstrate the thinness, even today, of the barrier between natural and supernatural. His best nonfiction studies sustain this work of recovery; thus
The Figure of Beatrice
tells not only of the influence of a thirteenth-century Florentine girl upon a great poet, but of the lessons of this poet for modern life. Owen Barfield excavated the past embedded within language, secreted in the plainest of words, in order to illuminate the future of consciousness in all its esoteric, scarcely imaginable glory.

There is another point that may explain the hostility of critics like Germaine Greer: the Inklings were, one and all, guilty of the heresy of the Happy Ending. A story that ends happily is, some believe, necessarily a sop to wishful thinking, a refusal to grow up. In “On Fairy-Stories”—the closest we come to a manifesto for the Inklings’ aesthetic—Tolkien turns this charge on its head, arguing that our deepest wishes, revealed by fairy stories and reawakened whenever we permit ourselves to enter with “literary belief” into a secondary world, are not compensatory fantasies but glimpses of an absolute reality. When Sam Gamgee cries out, “O great glory and splendour! And all my wishes have come true!” we are not in the realm of escapism, but of the Gospel, in all its strangeness and beauty.

Yet although the Inklings were guilty of the heresy of the Happy Ending, they were not optimists; they were war writers who understood that sacrifices must be made and that not all wounds will be healed in this life. Their belief in the Happy Ending was compatible with considerable anguish and uncertainty here below. One may be as gloomy as Puddleglum or as convinced as Frodo that “All my choices have proved ill” without losing hope in a final redemption.

And it is on the strength of this hope that the Inklings’ project of recovery continues to unfold. Though surpassed in poetry and prose style by the very modernists they failed to appreciate, though surpassed in technical sophistication by any number of distinguished academic philosophers and theologians, the Inklings fulfilled what many find to be a more urgent need: not simply to restore the discarded image, but to refresh it and bring it to life for the present and future.

Literary revolutions leave many in their wake; but some of those who excoriate the Inklings may come to see that Tolkien, Lewis, Barfield, Williams, and their associates, by returning to the fundamentals of story and exploring its relation to faith, virtue, self-transcendence, and hope, have renewed a current that runs through the heart of Western literature, beginning with Virgil and the
Beowulf
poet; that they have recovered archaic literary forms not as an antiquarian curiosity but as a means of squarely addressing modern anxieties and longings. From our present vantage point this looks like a signal and even unprecedented achievement; but what permanent place the Inklings may come to occupy in Christian renewal and, more broadly, in intellectual and artistic history, is for the future to decide.

NOTES

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PROLOGUE: DABBLERS IN INK

“a circle of instigators”: John Wain,
Sprightly Running
:
Part of an Autobiography
(New York: St. Martin’s, 1962; London: Macmillan, 1962), 181.

“a pleasantly ingenious pun”: J.R.R. Tolkien,
The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien
, a selection edited by Humphrey Carpenter with the assistance of Christopher Tolkien (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1995), 388.

“whispering from her towers”: Matthew Arnold, Preface to the First Edition of Essays in Criticism [First Series] (London: Macmillan, 1865), in Matthew Arnold,
Essays, Letters, and Reviews
, ed. Fraser Neiman (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1960), 98.

“Did I ride, one sunset”: Max Beerbohm, “Diminuendo,” in Max Beerbohm,
The Works of Max Beerbohm
, ed. John Lane (London: John Lane, The Bodley Head, 1921), 151–52.

“the Oxford Christians”: Charles Moorman,
The Precincts of Felicity: The Augustinian City of the Oxford Christians
(Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1966). See especially the epilogue, assessing the character of the “Oxford Christians” as a movement, 137–39.

“an organized group”: W. H. Lewis
, Brothers and Friends: The Diaries of Major Warren Hamilton Lewis
, ed. Clyde S. Kilby and Marjorie Lamp Mead (San Francisco and New York: Harper & Row, 1982), 268.

“as organically Christian”: Jan Morris,
Oxford
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 164.

“the Victorian crisis of doubt”: Timothy Larsen,
Crisis of Doubt: Honest Faith in Nineteenth-Century England
(Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2006).

“like monasteries”: Victor Gollancz,
My Dear Timothy: An Autobiographical Letter to His Grandson
(New York: Simon and Schuster, 1953), 416. Quoted in
The Oxford Book of Oxford
, ed. Jan Morris (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 336.

The Oxford University Roll of Service: For more information on the number of Oxford students who perished in World War I, see Richard Tames,
A Traveller’s History of Oxford
(New York and Northampton: Interlink Books, 2003), 240.

“on or about December 1910”: Virginia Woolf,
Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown
(London: L. and Virginia Woolf, 1924), 4.

severing ties: The standard view of the cultural impact of the Great War is summed up by Samuel Hynes as follows: “a generation of innocent young men, their heads full of high abstractions like Honour, Glory, and England, went off to war to make the world safe for democracy. They were slaughtered in stupid battles planned by stupid generals. Those who survived were shocked, disillusioned and embittered by their war experiences, and saw that their real enemies were not the Germans, but the old men at home who had lied to them. They rejected the values of the society that had sent them to war, and in doing so separated their own generation from the past and from their cultural inheritance.” In
A War Imagined: The First World War and English Culture
(New York: Atheneum, 1991), xii.

“higher literary aspirations”: Anthony Burgess in
The Observer
, November 26, 1978, quoted in Tom Shippey,
J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2002), 308.

1. “A STAR SHINES ON THE HOUR OF OUR MEETING”

“My dear Mr. & Mrs. Tolkien … when he’s very much
un
dressed”: A reproduction of the letter from which these quotations are taken appears in John and Priscilla Tolkien,
The Tolkien Family Album
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1992), 17.

gigantic size: In a June 7, 1955, letter to W. H. Auden, Tolkien denied any connection between his childhood spider bite and his adult spider-monsters. This is in keeping with his intense dislike of any effort to read into
The Lord of the Rings
events in his own life or in the outer world. However, it is easy to imagine that the attack in Africa may have left a subconscious scar, eventually recorded in his fictional universe.

“The dragon had the trade-mark
Of Fa
ë
rie
”: J.R.R. Tolkien, “On Fairy-Stories,”
Tree and Leaf
(London: George Allen & Unwin, 1964), 39–40.

“attend mass regularly for a time to note well the mummeries thereof”: Charlotte Bront
ë
, in Margot Peters,
Unquiet Soul: A Biography of Charlotte Bront
ë
(New York: Atheneum, 1986), 109, quoted in Patrick Allitt,
Catholic Converts: British and American Intellectuals Turn to Rome
(Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2000), 23.

“why, if people must have a religion”: Virginia Woolf,
The Voyage Out
(New York: George H. Doran, 1920), 95.

“there is no hurt among all the human hurts deeper”: Leon Edel,
Bloomsbury: A House of Lions
(Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1979), 20.

“gifted lady of great beauty”: Tolkien,
Letters
, 54.

“worn out with persecution”: Ibid., 353–54.

“If you have these by heart”: Ibid., 66.

Catholic prayers: Published in two parts in the journal
Vinyar Tengwar
: “‘Words of Joy’: Five Catholic Prayers in Quenya,” ed. Patrick Wynne, Arden R. Smith, and Carl F. Hostetter,
Vinyar Tengwar
43 (January 2002): 4–38;
Vinyar Tengwar
44 (June 2002): 5–20.

“a devout and strict old-fashioned Catholic”: George Sayer, “Recollections of J.R.R. Tolkien,” in
Proceedings of the J.R.R. Tolkien Centenary Conference
, Keble College, Oxford, 1992, ed. Patricia Reynolds and Glen H. GoodKnight (Milton Keynes: Tolkien Society; Altadena, Calif.: Mythopoeic Press, 1995), 23.

“The Church is the mother”:
Catechism of the Catholic Church
(Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 1994), chap. 3, article 1, 181.

“all the responses very loudly in Latin”: Simon Tolkien, “My Grandfather,”
The Mail on Sunday
, February 23, 2003.

“the first [language] to take me by storm”: J.R.R. Tolkien, “English and Welsh,” in J.R.R. Tolkien,
The Monster and the Critics and Other Essays
, ed. Christopher Tolkien (London: HarperCollins, 1997), 191–92.

Ruginwaldus Dwalak
ō
neis: Tolkien,
Letters
, 357.

“it was your works”: Elizabeth Mary Wright,
The Life of Joseph Wright by Elizabeth Mary Wright
(London: Oxford University Press, 1931), vol. 2, 651.

What was this discipline: For further insight into Tolkien’s love affair with philology (itself a love affair with words and their histories), see the works of the medievalist and Anglo-Saxonist Tom Shippey, who held Tolkien’s former post at Leeds, and went on to produce the pioneering study of Tolkien’s scholarly mythopoeia in
The Road to Middle-earth
, which accomplished for Tolkien what John Livingston Lowes did for Coleridge in
The Road to Xanadu: A Study in the Ways of the Imagination
(1927). Tom Shippey,
The Road to Middle-Earth: [How J.R.R. Tolkien Created a New Mythology]
, rev. and exp. ed. (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2003).