Transcript
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My name is Colin Duriez.
Well, it all started when I was in grammar school.
In one of the classes, we were reading around C.S. Lewis's
book, "Mere Christianity."
I'd never heard of C.S. Lewis, and I was gripped by his style.
I wanted to read all his books.
And it was through him that I came across the name Tolkien.
And that interested me because I've got a French surname and I thought, "Ah, he's somebody
with a Germanic surname.
That's interesting."
And then of course, Arbit appeared and I read that.
And then I went off to Istanbul for two years, the University of Istanbul.
And it's there that I read The Lord of the Rings, borrowed the books from the British
Council Library.
And that's where it all started.
and I started writing an article on Tolkien, which I called "Leonardo, Tolkien and Mr Baggins"
and I'd given it as a talk and I did kind of an essay as part of my course at the university
and then I met somebody who was from an American university and he was just there for a year,
had a transfer, he was a two, and he sent it off, he said, "Could I send it off to Clyde Kilby at,
in Wheaton College?" who was, who had met Tolkien and had spent a summer with him actually,
to help him when he was working on his, on his, the Silmarillion and that. And Clyde Kilby asked
if he could send it on to California because there was lots of interest in Tolkien there,
you know, it was kind of hippie era. And it appeared in a fanzine, basically, about Tolkien,
which was a very interesting one. And that was my first big article on Tolkien. And that's where it
all started. And then since then, I've written quite a few books on Tolkien and his friend C.S.
Lewis and I've also veered towards Harry Potter and others, but I just like, you know,
very much like fantasy writing and that was something that drew me in. And one of the
earliest books I wrote was on the friendship between Tolkien and Lewis, which interested
me greatly. And Tolkien, after the First World War, he came back to Oxford and he worked
for a while on the big English dictionary. I think it was called the English Dictionary
that I can't remember the exact name that it had, but he was given to work on the W
section of it, which I think he enjoyed very much and was very much akin to his knowledge
of philology and the history of words. It was very much his delight to do that. And
after that, he got a job as a professor at Leeds University, where he very much enjoyed
teaching the students. And after a while, he then got a professorship in Anglo-Saxon
here in Oxford to Pembroke College. And it was a year after that that he met C.S. Lewis,
not long after Tolkien had started as a don at Magdalen College, teaching him English.
And he also taught some philosophy and other subjects. But English was his great love,
especially going back to medieval literature. And he also was very knowledgeable through his study
on classics and he was very wide-read. But they met at an English tea, as it was called,
here in Merton College to talk about teaching English at the university, presumably. And
so that's where Lewis started chatting with Tolkien. And afterwards he quite liked him
and he thought he was okay but he needed a kind of a slap or so and then he'd be alright.
Yes, he had an interesting way of interacting with each other, didn't he?
That's right.
So how did the Inklings come about? What was the origin of that group?
Well it grew over a period. It eventually started off from friends that knew each other.
some of them were friends that Lewis had made as an undergraduate. And there came a point when
there was a group of students that started a group called the Inklings. One of them was
a brother of a famous filmmaker. But anyway, they were, and it was a very mixed group of people.
It wasn't, they weren't all just Oxford Dons or professors and so on. They were a mix and
and they weren't all teaching the same subject. They weren't all, say, teaching English literature,
but various subjects. For example, one of the early members of the group was C.S. Lewis's GP,
which was Dr. Humphrey Havard. Well, Humphrey was a nickname from one of the other Inklings,
which happened a lot. They liked to play around with words all the time. That was part of it.
they loved talking. And another idea behind it was a lot of them were writing, starting to write. I
mean Owen Barford, for example, had written a number of things, very important books. And
also there was a lot of conversation about what people were writing. They would give feedback
to it, rather like a writers club that we have in this country and other places, which are very
helpful. I know when I lived in Leicester I went to an excellent writers club and I
learnt a lot from it because I was writing a variety of kind of books and I would get
feedback and I can understand why the Inklings was so attractive to young scholars or people
that were entering into the academic world or into a teaching world or whatever and would
gain a lot from it. So it wasn't until about 1933 that the Inklings were given that name.
Well, actually, the name was never printed anywhere, but that seems to be when the name
started anyway. And so it grew out of friendship and Lewis was very, and it was very much around
C.S. Lewis, there's a rather amusing letter that Charles Williams, during the wartime when he
had to come to Oxford, you know, as an evacuee in a sense, working for Oxford University Press,
and he would write quite a lot of letters to Dorothy L Sayers, who was a friend of hers,
and Lewis said that she knew nothing about the Inglings, but in one of the letters
the Williams talked about the group being like a court, a court of the king. And the king,
of course, was C.S. Lewis. And it was quite amusing to have the inklings described in that way. And
there's lots of different ways that you can describe them. But the fact is that they were
real human beings. They were interacting as friends and there was one or two bumps in it.
for example, Hugo Dyson, who was one of the important members of the group, he rather
disliked the Lord of the Rings and Tolkien was reading many, many chapters from the Lord
of the Rings as it was being written. And Dyson didn't like it at all. And he had a
Vito to stop people just talking about elves and fairies and things like that. And it was
quite funny. But on one occasion, Dyson was late arriving, which was quite something happened
quite a lot. And they'd all got down to listening to Tolkien, reading another chapter and, you
know, very important section where everybody was following it. And Dyson burst into Lewis's
rooms. And immediately the Vito came into, well, they stopped listening to, Tolkien had to stop.
And then they got on with, so they were a very, I mean, they were a very interesting group of
people. And there came a time when they stopped reading and they continued discussion groups in
pubs, so it became more of a conversational group after that, although there was lots of conversation
at the time when the reading was done by various people as well, you know, centred around what had
been read. And the conversational side of the group is just as important as the reading, in
my view anyway, having researched as much as I could. - So what do you think the Inklings meant
to Tolkien, do you think he would have written his works without it?
I think they were very important to him, I think, to have a listenership to what he was writing,
because he knew he was going into ground that was, I mean, he knew that in the medieval period
people would have fantasy and supernatural beings and so on, but it was a very different world that
he was in and to have a group of people that listened to him and responded to it and at the
time when his book came out, his friend C.S. Lewis wrote some blurb about it and Tolkien
actually was a bit worried in case, no I think Lewis was a bit worried because he thought that
maybe some people who didn't like him, it might have a bad effect on Tolkien's book.
So if there was one thing by Tolkien everyone should read,
What do you think? Where would you start? What age are you referring to?
An adult. Adults. I think they should start reading The Hobbit.
It's quite a good, I say it's a bit contentious, is it? Do you start with Lord of the Rings or
The Hobbit? Because The Hobbit being a children's book can put people off.
Yeah, it is. That's the first book of Tolkien I read as soon as I got hooked via Lewis. I saw
the Hobbit in the WH Smiths and bought it and I was when I was traveling to Istanbul and I was
reading it on the journey and I just fell in love with it and then I found that the Lord, it led to
the Lord of the Rings and that was the next step. So in terms of starting it's a difficult question
but the fact is that the films by Peter Jackson have encouraged many people to read. I think the
The sales of The Lord of the Rings have gone up quite a bit since those films came out.
I mean, some people didn't like the films.
I remember when I was walking through a street in Leicester, I belonged to a small Tolkien
group then, and one of the people there, he was almost in tears, he'd just seen the film.
And he said, "Wasn't it so horrible?"
And I said, "Well, I really liked it."
I thought, you know, films are a very different medium to writing books.
And I said that Peter Jackson had done a very good job.
So probably that would be a good place for people to start, Lord of the Rings.
Thanks for listening to Mythmakers Podcast.
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