Transcript
[Music]
Hello and welcome to Mythmakers.
Mythmakers is the podcast for fantasy fans and fantasy creatives
brought to you by the Oxford Centre for Fantasy.
My name is Julia Golding.
Now today I want to share with you a very special evening we ran last year
to recreate an Inklings event.
And we did this in the beautiful surroundings of Merton College, Oxford, where Tolkien was
a professor at the end of his life.
Of course, the Inklings actually more normally met at Magdalen College, which is just over
the road from Merton.
And it is there that we start this presentation, because the person who holds the seat that
Lewis held in his day, Professor Simon Horrobin, spoke to us in his room, which is a few doors
down from where CS Lewis used to host the Inklings.
I'm Simon Horrobin and I'm a fellow and tutor in English here at Magdalen College.
And I believe you hold a particularly significant office.
That's right. I'm lucky enough to have the job that CS Lewis himself had when he was
here and not quite in the same rooms as him but in the same building.
So you've been working on a book about C.S. Lewis. So
can you tell us how did Tolkien and C.S. Lewis first meet?
So they first met in 1926 at a meeting of the English faculty and they'd both actually
recently joined the English faculty. Lewis had been in Oxford before but he'd just got
his job here at Magdalene. Tolkien had just arrived as the new Rawlinson and Bosworth
Professor of Anglo-Saxon from Leeds University. They met there at a meeting where they were
discussing syllabus reform - a rather dry topic. Actually, it was quite heated because there was
a lot of antagonism between the English literature side of the course and the English language people.
Tolkien and Lewis found themselves on opposite sides of that debate. But despite that, they got
to know each other, got on very well because they both shared this love of the mythologies of the
Anglo-Saxons and Norse mythology. And so they quickly came to become close friends, even though
they were on opposite sides of that debate. And they went on to have regular meetings in
a reading group, didn't they? Can you tell us something about the Coal Biters?
So one of the things that Tolkien set up shortly after he came to Oxford was this
old Icelandic reading group which was called the Coal Biters. It was sort of modelled on a
Viking club that he'd set up at Leeds. And what he was trying to do was to promote
the understanding of an ability to read Icelandic literature in the original Old Norse.
and he invited Lewis to join that group. Lewis had already fallen in love with
old Icelandic literature, even as a child. As a 13-year-old, he discovered the poetry of the
Vikings, essentially, but he couldn't read it in the original. So this was a great opportunity for
him. Tolkien invited a number of distinguished philologists from around the university.
so the professor of Celtic was a member of it, the professor of Byzantine Greek,
the professor of comparative philology, so it was a pretty highbrow get-together. And they
essentially were set chunks of sagas or poems to translate in advance, and then they'd turn up at
the meeting and Tolkien would kind of help them through, essentially. And how did that co-writer
group become the Inklings? Well, it didn't directly in the sense that Lewis was going to
lots of reading groups, discussion groups. Pretty much every night he went to something.
So he set up the Micklemus Club here in Magdalene, which was a kind of philosophical debating
society. He was going to the Socratic Club, a kind of religious debating group. And he had
Beer and Beowulf with his undergraduate students. And the Inklings itself started off as a group at
university college, which is where Lewis had been an undergrad. And he and Tolkien were invited
along as senior members, but it was essentially an undergraduate's reading group where they
read their own compositions to each other and commented on it. And it kind of fizzled out
because it was being led by undergraduates who left the university. And then the Inklings itself
started, borrowed the name from that group, and it was really centered around Lewis himself,
and Tolkien, who was a particularly close friend by that point, and their other friends and
associates. Not necessarily all members of the university, but connected with it, and many with
the same kinds of interests. And it became a kind of group for sharing work in progress and commenting
on it. So what do you think a meeting of the Inklings would have been like? Because we are
actually sitting here in the new building where they met in very much a room very similar to where
they met every week. That's right, yeah. So they would have turned up I think about nine o'clock
And it began with Lewis essentially saying, "Who's got something to read?" And then somebody
would begin by just reading a section of something that they had been working on.
If it was Tolkien, it was likely the next installment of The Lord of the Rings,
or the New Hobbit book, as Lewis always referred to it. In Lewis's case, he read them The Problem
of Pain and his science fiction works, The Out of the Silent Planet, Perilandra, The Great Divorce.
Essentially, they went around the room and read a bit and then made comments on each other's work.
It would often lead into other kinds of discussion on themes that had emerged,
even though they were quite different, many of the contributions. So Warnie Lewis,
Lewis's brother, was a member and wrote 17th century French history.
Louis's family doctor, Humphrey Havard, was an inkling and would give accounts of
his latest mountaineering holiday. And you wonder how they managed to find common themes
with this, but that's seemingly what happened. And this would go on quite often until quite
late in the night.
So you hold Louis's position now at the college as professor of English language and literature.
aspects of Lewis's interest in medieval literature and earlier literature did he share with Tolkien
in particular? Well, both Lewis and Tolkien were interested in medieval literature broadly
conceived. So Tolkien had the chair of Anglo-Saxon literature and was particularly engaged with the
Anglo-Saxon epic poem Beowulf. It's a work that he was involved in translating. His translation's
only recently been published. He gave a very important lecture about Beowulf, which kind
of stimulated lots of new work as a poem. And so that was a work that Lewis himself
would have been teaching regularly. He had his Beowulf sessions with his undergraduate
students. And you can see that certainly influencing both of their fiction. I mean, it's the most
obvious, I suppose, in The Hobbit, because it's the story of a dragon sitting on a treasure
horde. Somebody steals a cup from the treasure. He takes out his vengeance on the local town,
burning it down. And then Beowulf has to come and kill the dragon. And it's clear echoes there of
the events at the end of The Hobbit. And they both would have talked widely across the Middle Ages.
So Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, an Arthurian poem which Tolkien himself edited. The edition
that he edited is still one that we use today with students. There's a nice copy of it that
survives. It's Lewis's own copy of Sir Gowen and the Green Knight in the Bodleian Library,
heavily annotated. You can see his reactions to some of Tolkien's editorial decisions - not always
favourable. That again is a work that you can see cropping up in both of their fictions,
particularly in the Narnian stories, I suppose, where Arthurian literature has an important part
to play. And now over to Colin Duriez to tell us about his fascination with Tolkien.
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, 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, I had a transfer, he was a two, and he sent it off,
he said could I send it off to Clyde Kilby in Wheaton College, who had met Tolkien and
spent a summer with him actually, to help him when he was working on 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, 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
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, who had 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, you know,
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 all right. Yes, he had an interesting way of interacting with each other.
So how did the Inklings come about? What was the origin of that? 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 the brother of a famous filmmaker. But anyway, they
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 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,
although Humphrey was a nickname from one of the other Inklings, which happened a lot,
they like to play around with words all the time.
That was part of it.
They love 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 writer's 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 the 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 Alsace,
who was a friend of hers. And Lewis said that she knew nothing about the Inklings,
but in one of the letters, 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 Lord of the Rings and Tolkien was reading many, many chapters from the Lord of the Rings as
was being written and Dyson didn't like it at all. And he had a veto 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, 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.
That's quite a bit, I say always a bit contentious, is it? Do you start with Lord
the Rings or The Hobbit because The Hobbit being a children's book can put people off.
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 travelling 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
of the Rings and Elsa 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 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.
My name is Owen Barfield and I'm the grandson of the other Owen Barfield, who some people
know as the first and last Inklings.
So Owen Barfield was one of the four principal Inklings and I'm the only grandchild and I
was 28 years old when grandfather passed away so I knew him well.
So tell us a bit about your grandfather and his...
And next we have Owen Barfield, who shares the same name as his grandfather, Owen Barfield,
who was the first of the Inklings.
So he was an undergraduate here.
But he was an independent scholar, I think would be the words people use now.
So his life was very much led in three parts.
The first part as a poet-author, the middle part as a lawyer-family man, and then as the
final part as the professor. But his professorship, although he was lined up to have a role in
academia here at Oxford, he was blackballed and instead he was a visiting professor in America,
a series of American universities. - And what was his academic interest?
- Well his theme was the evolution of consciousness. So that was the big theme.
and the way he particularly studied it is the history of language and the use of language.
In fact, his second published book was History in English Words.
So how did your grandfather get involved with the Inklings?
Well, he would say that they got involved with him because he would consider himself the first
England if you like. He was 15 years old at school in Highgate School, sat in a Latin class with his
best friend Cecil Harwood and they were translating a Latin verse and there was a word that literally
meant death but Cecil translated it as walking out of life and in that moment Grandfather realised
that by studying language you can see the evidence for an evolution of consciousness
and from there he built up his philosophy, Bartholdian philosophy.
So what kind of contribution did he make to the Inklings? What did he read to them?
Well, he made all sorts of contributions, but first of all, his interest was music and dance,
and people don't associate the Inklings with music and dance, but that's where grandfather
first got involved. And so here we need to bring in Maud, grandmother. So she was organizing a
dance tour of Cornwall, folk dance tour of Cornwall. And she asked for volunteers,
grandfather volunteered, and that's how they met. And if during two summers, they toured Cornwall
with this folk music and dance show, but they also brought it to Oxford. And so in that year,
which they brought it to Oxford, which I think is 1922, November. That's when I would say the
Inkling impulse entered Oxford. It started from there. And Maud of course was a great fan,
well, friend of C.S. Lewis and a supporter of Grandfather's work.
So as we have the grandson here, can you tell us any of your own memories of your
granddad, what was he like as a person? Well I like being with him so um from about the age of 14 or so
I prefer to go by myself to visit him than with my parents maybe you know you want to put some
distance to your parents but they would go one weekend on a Sunday and then I'd wait and I'd go
the alternative month if you like so every sort of couple of months I'll go and visit
usually on a Sunday, um, for to have lunch and then tea with him. Um,
we'd walk around, we'd walk in the countryside, walk around the garden of the residential home
that he was living in later on and conversations, drinking, tea drinking, uh, was always a part of
the visit. And, um, for me, he was really just grandfather. I was never aware of him being in
in England or his England interests or his philosophy.
So I think grandfather compartmentalized his life
as many people do.
And I was in the family compartment.
So for example, I was his executor with my father,
but everything to do with his literary estate,
he'd appointed four literary executors.
So we weren't to get involved with that.
It was only much later when I felt the literary executors
were no longer doing anything,
that I started to ask questions
and take an interest in grandfather's work.
So for me, grandfather was first and foremost,
you know, a man I like to be with.
- Thank you.
And last we have Alicia Smith to introduce us
to that strangest of the Inklings, Charles Williams.
- And my interest in the Inklings goes back to,
well, to childhood.
read Lewis and Tolkien like many people. But I then, when I was doing my English degree,
my first degree here, I got the opportunity to write an extended essay on the Inklings,
which was a lot of fun. And that's where I accounted not only more of Lewis and Tolkien's
work than I'd read as a child, but also Charles Williams's work, his novels primarily and
of his poetry, what I read at that time. So that's my interest. I worked particularly on
their attitudes to academia and to work and community, which was really interesting
preparation for doing graduate studies myself in the university.
So tell us about Charles Williams. Who was he, first and foremost? Where did he come from?
So he had a bit of a different background to some of the other Inklings, although they are a very
varied group so that's maybe not much to say. He was a publisher, he worked for Oxford University
Press all his working life. He didn't have a university degree, that made him quite different
to the rest of them, but he was a very intelligent person, self-taught in large part, a very kind of
literate, full of quotations, very like Lewis. And he, alongside his publishing work, lectured and
wrote various kinds of literature and criticism. He was often published as a reviewer and a critic.
Lewis and Hume sort of met because they wrote each other fan mail, essentially,
their letters congratulating each other on recent novels kind of almost crossed in the post.
And then when the war broke out, Williams moved up to Oxford with OUP and became quite a core part
of the Inklings at that time, so he met a lot of the rest of that group.
So what was his first entry to the Inklings? How was he connected?
Primarily through Lewis, his friendship with Lewis. Lewis really liked him, possibly more
than some of the other members of the group. Williams tended to be quite a divisive personality,
he was very vivid, people often liked him at first, you know, first meeting,
but he could be a challenging person as well by all accounts. But he was quite a vivid,
quite a, he was quite a central part of the Inklings for the years that he was in Oxford
until he sadly died quite young, not long after that.
He's been called the most extraordinary of the Inklings. If there was one thing
by him that you would suggest people read, what would you point them to?
I think I'd recommend his novel Descent into Hell, which is very strange. Be prepared for a strange
novel, but it is, it's an astonishing meditation on what creativity and community meant to Williams
and could mean in a kind of theological way, as well as being a sort of thriller. One of the
characters is dead throughout the whole novel. There are sort of doppelgangers and ghosts and
all kinds of things going on. It's a really interesting kind of, one of his supernatural
to remember this afternoon.
Thank you for listening.
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