In a Platonic sense, the Inklings might very well have brought about an “anamnesis,” a remembering of what had been lost, but they might also very well have been simply preservers of timeless wisdom for many ages to come, so far into the future that they seem unimaginable.
A number of things can be stated about the Inklings as a whole. First, the Inklings saw themselves as bardic defenders of the best of western civilization. One only has to think of the numerous passages from The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion, all of which praise the best of the West while never failing to recognize its many sins and sinful longings. The Inklings remained patriotic while also recognizing that true patriotism demands critique, restraint, and self-censorship. The profound Anglo-Welsh man of letters, Christopher Dawson, remarked in his Gifford Lectures of the late 1940s that the bard—by whatever name or title—stood at the very center of every community, culture, or civilization. He (or she) spoke with the voice of the divine through the poetic and the prophetic, thus acting as an intermediary and a bridge between a god and his worshippers in community. When absent, so, too, is its representative culture or civilization. There is, of course, a deeply mystical, humanistic, and anti-rationalist belief in such an ideal. It has the feel of Socrates and Plato all over it. Yet, far from arrogant in its meaning, such a belief is deeply humbling as well as deeply burdensome. Only through story can a community understand itself, inherit its just rewards, and pass on its wisdom to the next generation, hoping against all odds that that future generation will embrace and transmit the wisdom of ages, on and on. To break the chain serves as the height of arrogance and presumption, whether by an individual, a community, or a generation—what Barfield and Lewis called “chronological snobbery.”
Here, then, one might readily see the Inklings as members of a poetic as well as a prophetic community. There are equal parts Plato and Jeremiah in the group, and one finds throughout their works—whether the fiction of Tolkien and Lewis or the biographies of Lord David Cecil—thorough, wide, and deep discussions of dreaming, poetry, imagination, visions, and mystical experiences. Lewis and Tolkien each believed in personal forms of mystical experience, but they also imbued their fictional characters with these same attributes. The physical senses matter, to be sure, but the soul and the imagination matter even more so. Each considered beauty, properly understood, as a contextualization of hope. Beyond this, the bard should touch upon the meaning of meaning, heroism, beauty, holiness, and sanctity, while never forgetting the more mundane things such as style, context, and presentation. The bard expresses all of these longings with whatever gifts have been given him and to the community, whether those of the community possess the ears, the will, or the integrity to hear and understand or not.
One might readily think of Aragorn telling the tale of Beren and Luthien, only moments before the Ringwraiths attack at Weathertop. Still a stranger to his companions at that point in the story, Aragorn serves here as the bard, but his tale has as much in common with prayer as it does with mere tale-telling. Indeed, could one even imagine The Lord of the Rings absent its myriad of songs? Each connects the singer to something historical and significant, binding together not only the immediate group, but tying that group to something larger. Even the seemingly homely songs of Sam bind the company to the hearth and home of The Shire.
Second, the various Inklings took seriously the ideas and realities of friendship as a necessary bulwark against the dread conformity of the modern, western free world, what Alexis de Tocqueville called “democratic despotism” and that of the East, totalitarianism. Here, again, one must think in pre- or a-ideological terms. A true friendship, by its very nature, is exclusive but non-political. “That outlook which values the collective above the individual necessarily disparages Friendship; it is a relation between men at their highest level of individuality,” Lewis wrote. “It withdraws men from collective “togetherness” as surely as solitude itself could do; and more dangerously, for it withdraws them by two’s and three’s.”[1]
Yet, we must not think of “the crowd” and then “the Inklings.” Instead, as Lewis and Tolkien understood it, a free and properly functioning world meant that millions upon millions of communities existed, some overlapping, some not. An individual person belongs not just to one such community at any given time in his or her life, but rather to many, often simultaneously. Time and circumstance, as much as personal desire and loyalty, would shape the time and treasure a person gives to each association to which he belongs.
And, whatever opposition the world offered, friendship was worth it. Throughout Tolkien’s academic as well as fictional writings, he stressed again and again the necessity of friendship and community. In some of his earliest tales, not surprisingly, Tolkien began his stories in a room or hall, with all of the characters seated around a fire. The fire that warmed the hearts of the bards as well as the audience he called the “Tale-fire.”[2] A similar place existed in the house of Elrond, in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. On a much more personal level, Tolkien had always belonged to some group of friends that had dedicated itself to some mission or calling. Prior to the war, Tolkien had experienced an incredible and meaningful friendship with three others in his school, King Edward’s: Christopher Wiseman, Geoffrey Smith, and Rob Gilson. The best of friends, they had called themselves the TCBS, the Tea Club and Barrovian Society. They stayed close to one another after graduating, holding period “Councils” to share poetry and ideas.
Gilson died on July 1, 1916, at the Somme. Shaken, Tolkien had written that the three remaining had a duty, a duty to achieve greatness, not for personal glory, but for God’s glory, to be a “great instrument in God’s hands.” Just as Gilson had achieved greatness through his sacrifice for something greater than himself, so the remaining three friends must be “steeped with the same holiness of courage suffering and sacrifice.” Tolkien considered July 1 a holy day, to be remembered for the rest of their lives. So he wrote Smith on August 12.[3] Sometime in the week before Christmas of that year, Tolkien received a letter from Wiseman. German shrapnel had taken the life of Smith.[4] Now, only two remained. “Of course the TCBS may have been all we dreamt,” Tolkien had written in that letter to Smith, “and its work in the end to be done by three or two or one survivor and the part of the others be trusted by God to that of the inspiration which we do know we all got and get from one another.”[5] These words must have echoed in Tolkien’s mind and soul as he pondered the death of Smith.
Lewis, too, wrote openly about the necessity of friendship and exclusion. “Friendship is the greatest of worldly goods,” Lewis claimed in a personal letter. “Certainly to me it is the chief happiness of life. If I had to give a piece of advice to a young man about a place to live, I think I shd. say, ‘sacrifice almost everything to live where you can be near your friends.”[6]
Third, the Inklings were extraordinary at making the good, good. They did this through myth (poetic myth at that) itself. “We may indeed be older now, in so far as we are heirs in enjoyment or in practice of many generations of ancestors in the arts. In this inheritance of wealth there may be a danger of boredom or of anxiety to be original, and that may lead to a distaste for fine drawing, delicate pattern, and ‘pretty’ colours, or else to mere manipulation and over elaboration of old material, clever and heartless,” Tolkien lectured to an academic audience at the University of St. Andrews in the late 1930s. “We should look at green again, and be startled anew (but not blinded) by blue and yellow and red. We should meet the centaur and the dragon, and then perhaps suddenly behold, like ancient shepherds, sheep, dogs, and horses–and wolves.”[7] Further, why should one protest so-called “escape” that literature and mythology provide, Tolkien asked? “For it is after all possible for a rational man, after reflection (quite unconnected with fairy-story or romance), to arrive at the condemnation, implicit at least in the mere silence of ‘escapist’ literature, of progressive things like factories, or the machine-guns and bombs that appear to be their most natural and inevitable, dare we say ‘inexorable’, products.”[8]
One can also think of Tolkien’s description of Gandalf in The Silmarillion. Gandalf, known as Olorin in the True West, had been the least of the Istari sent to Middle-earth to aid Men and Elves in their war against Sauron. Though the least powerful, he was the wisest, and he spent many of his days walking among the Elves “unseen, or in a form as one of them, and they did not know whence came the fair visions or the promptings of wisdom that he put into their hearts.” The Silmarillion records that “those who listened to him awoke from despair and put away the imaginations of darkness.”[9]
Lewis also admired the art of escape through poetry, literature, and the imagination. “The Fantastic or Mythical is a Mode available at all ages for some readers; for others, at none. At all ages, if it is well used by the author and meets the right reader, it has the same power,” Lewis wrote for the New York Times in 1956, “to generalise while remaining concrete, to present in palpable form not concepts or even experiences but whole classes of experience, and to throw off irrelevancies.” In its best form, the fantastic can “add to” life, not just “comment on” it.[10]
In his 1928 book, Poetic Diction, Owen Barfield had written: “A civilization which must look more and more to art—to the individualized poet—as the very source and fountain-head of all meaning.”[11] In a 1984 interview, Barfield nicely summed up the thinking of Lewis and Tolkien on art and literature: all “felt that literature shouldn’t be used as a means of propagating a message.” Further, he noted, “The thing that mattered was that it was a good work of art, and that had its own value, which in the long run was a Christian value. I think that that would perhaps be as fair a ways as I could imagine of stating both Tolkien’s and Lewis’s attitude.”[12]
Fourth, and related to the first point, the Inklings as a whole viewed themselves and their group as making a final, noble, and romantic defense of the Old West. Lewis, in his Cambridge Inaugural Address, described himself as a dinosaur, one of the last “Old Western Men”:[13]
It is my settled conviction that in order to read Old Western literature aright you must suspend most of the responses and unlearn most of the habits you have acquired in reading modern literature. And because this is the judgement of a native, I claim that, even the defence of my conviction is weak, the fact of my conviction is a historical datum to which you should give full weight. That way, where I fail as a critic, I may yet be useful as a specimen. I would even dare to go further. Speaking not only for myself but for all other Old Western men whom you may meet, I would say, use your specimens while you can. There are not going to be many more dinosaurs. [14]
Clyde Kilby who wrote about Lewis, also worked closely with Tolkien on The Silmarillion during the summer of 1966, explained:
Like Lewis, Tolkien was an Old Western Man who was staggered at the present direction of civilization. Even our much vaunted talk of equality he felt debased by our attempts to ‘mechanize and formalize it.’ Equality he believed to be primarily spiritual, not simply a moral, affair. Like Lewis, he regarded any evolutionary change as downward, not upward.[15]
While he saw evil in 1916, he also saw it in 1969. “The spirit of wickedness in high places is now so powerful and so many-headed in its incarnations,” Tolkien wrote, “that there seems nothing more to do than personally to refuse to worship any of the hydras’ heads.”[16] The world, he thought, seemed little better than a new Tower of Babel, “all noise and confusion.”[17] It would be difficult for a conservative and traditionalist such as Tolkien to have viewed the world in any other way. In addition to recognizing the effects of original sin in all eras and over all humans, Tolkien found the twentieth century especially troubling and downright horrifying. Tolkien had lamented the rise of what he and his friends called the machine, mechanizing life, dulling and conforming it, draining it of its vitality. The machine had appeared in a variety of forms. Democratic governments had bureaucratized the beauty out of language on the more benign end of the political continuum. At the other end, fascistic and communist ideologues had raped, plundered, murdered, and dehumanized entire populations, massacring upwards of 200,000,000 persons in the century.
Again, it is vital to understand The Inklings not in ideological terms, but in poetic and romantic terms. “The stance of a last survivor always attracted” Lewis, one of the youngest Inklings, J.A.W. Bennett remembered. “It is one of the likings he shared with William Morris, and it early drew him to the sagas and the doomed Eddaic gods.”[18] Whether it was through epic fantasies, science fiction, philosophy, or biography, the Inklings stood as a little platoon defending what would soon be lost utterly and completely to the world. The effort, no matter the cost or the result, remained the everlasting goal. Should fame or acknowledgement come to any or all of them was certainly fine, but it was fine only in that it promoted the whole and the message of the whole. “I don’t think Lewis and I were much ‘worried’ about the possibility of not becoming great men,” Barfield recalled in an interview given ten years after Lewis’s death.[19] They had their duty, and they would fulfill that duty no matter the cost and no matter how many or how few voices listened to them. As Tolkien put it, they were fighting the “Long Defeat.”
To conclude, we should note that in a Platonic sense, the Inklings might very well have brought about an anamnesis, a remembering of what had been lost, but they might also very well have been simply preservers of timeless wisdom for many ages to come, so far into the future that they seem unimaginable. Through their eff0rts, they might bring some back to first principles, reforming what had gone wrong in society. As the Inklings well knew, Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle came at the end and in the aftermath of fallen classical Greece; Cicero and Cato the Younger appeared at the end of the Roman republic; St. Augustine at the end of the Roman Empire; and Dante at the end of the Medieval. Each of these profound western men came at a moment in which they could imagine, ideally, what had come before them and pray that someone in the future would remember what was so rapidly being lost in their own day and age. So it was, most likely, with the Inklings.
This is part three in a series. The first essay may be found here, and the second here.
Author’s Note: This essay was a talk given on January 30, 2022, for Hillsdale’s Center for Constructive Alternatives. I would like to thank the students of his Christian Humanism class; Nathaniel and Dedra Birzer; Matt Bell, Doug Jeffrey, and Tim Caspar of the CCA office; and Dean Mark Kalthoff, Eric Hutchinson, Nathan Schlueter, and Jason Peters of the faculty roundtable.
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Notes:
[1] Lewis, The Four Loves, 59-60.
[2] Tolkien, Book of Lost Tales, 17.
[3] Letters, 9.
[4] Chronology, 96.
[5] Letters, 9.
[6] CSL Collected Letters, Vol. 2, pg. 174
[7] Tolkien, “On Fairy Stories,” 145-146.
[8] Tolkien, “On Fairy Stories,” 150.
[9] Tolkien, The Silmarillion, 30-31; and Tolkien, Unfinished Tales, 406.
[10] Reprinted in C.S. Lewis, On Stories: And Other Essays on Literature (San Diego: Harvest Books, 1988), 48.
[11] Barfield, Poetic Diction, 148.
[12] Lyle W. Dorsett Interview with Owen Barfield, July 19 and 20, 1984 (Kent, England) in WCWC.
[13] Reprinted as C.S. Lewis, “De Descriptione Temporum,” in Selected Literary Essays, ed. Walter Hooper (Cambridge, ENG: Cambridge University Press, 1969), 1-14.
[14] Reprinted as C.S. Lewis, “De Descriptione Temporum,” in Selected Literary Essays, 14.
[15] WCWC, Kilby Files, 3-8, “Tolkien the Man” from TOLKIEN AND THE SILMARILLION unpublished parts of chapter, “Woodland Prisoner,” pg. 13.
[16] Humphrey Carpenter, ed., The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1981), 402.
[17] Henry Resnick, “An Interview with Tolkien,” Niekas (Late Spring 1966): 42.
[18] Jack A.W. Bennett, Light on Lewis, 44.
[19] Owen Barfield, Kent, England, to James Patrick, 23 April 1973, in WCWC.
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