Inklings

The **Inklings** were an informal literary group which met in an pub in Oxford. Its members included John Ronald Reuel Tolkien, Charles Williams, and of course Clive Staples Lewis himself. The Space Trilogy arose directly out of interactions with this group - Lewis wrote *Out of the Silent Planet* after a challenge to Tolkien, although sadly Tolkien's effort only exists in a fragment. Williams also provides a major influence on the atmosphere and flavour of *That Hideous Strength*.

Other members included Roger Gilbert Lancelyn Green, Owen Barfield, Hugo Dyson, Nevill Coghill and Christopher Tolkien.

The group would often meet on Thursdays and Tuesdays, sometimes at the Oxford pub of The Eagle and the Child and at other times at Lewis' rooms in Magdalen College, to read and criticize the each member's literary work-in-progress.

Among notable novels first read to The Inklings were *The Lord of the Rings*, and Lewis's *Out of the Silent Planet*. The group was based out of the University of Oxford, as most of its members were academics there. It met between the 1930s and the 1960s.

The members read and reviewed each other's unfinished works. *The Lord of the Rings* was first read and commented on by the Inklings members.

## Mythopoeia

Tolkien wrote a poem titled *Mythopoeia* (myth making) following a discussion on the night of 19 September 1931 at Magdalen College, Oxford with C. S. Lewis and Hugo Dyson, in which he intended to explain and defend creative myth-making. The poem refers to the creative human author as "the little maker" wielding his "own small golden sceptre" and ruling his "subcreation" (understood as creation of Man within God's primary creation). This is considered a major influence on the whole group.

At the time that Tolkien debated the usefulness of myth and mythopoeia with C. S. Lewis in 1931, Lewis was a theist and liked but was skeptical of mythology, taking the position that myths were "lies and therefore worthless, even though 'breathed through silverTemplate:'". However Lewis later began to speak of Christianity as the one "true myth". Lewis wrote, "The story of Christ is simply a true myth: a myth working on us in the same way as the others, but with this tremendous difference that it really happened." Subsequently, his *Chronicles of Narnia* is regarded as mythopoeia, with storylines referencing that Christian mythology, namely the narrative of a great king who is sacrificed to save his people and is resurrected.

Lewis's mythopoeic intent is often confused with allegory, where the characters and world of Narnia would stand in direct equivalence with concepts and events from Christian theology and history, but Lewis repeatedly emphasized that an allegorical reading misses the point (the mythopoeia) of the Narnia stories. He shares this skepticism toward allegory with Tolkien, who disliked "conscious and intentional" allegory as it stood in opposition the broad and "inevitable" allegory of themes like "Fall" and "Mortality".

Clive Staples Lewis also created a mythopoeia in his neo-medieval representation of extra-planetary travel and planetary "bodies" in the Cosmic or Space Trilogy.

## See also

* J.B.S. Haldane
* John William Donne
* William T. Kirkpatrick
* David Lindsay
* William Olaf Stapledon
* John Ronald Reuel Tolkien
* Herbert George Wells
* Charles Williams

## References

1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 Cite error: Invalid `<ref>` tag; no text was provided for refs named `adcox`
2. ↑ Template:Harvard citation
3. ↑ Menion, 2003/2004 citing essays by Tolkien using the words "fundamental things".
4. ↑ Brown, Dave. Real Joy and True Myth. *Geocities.com*.
5. ↑ C.S. Lewis. Palgrave (2012).
6. ↑ Tolkien, J. R. R. (2014-02-21). The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien (en). Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.