The Inklings were the most important literary set of the twentieth century. The group that centered around C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien influenced not just the direction of literature—especially through fantasy, science fiction, and biography—but the very direction of our civilization as World War II reshaped what it meant to be a man of the West.
Though much has been written about them, almost all scholarship on the Inklings has revolved around Lewis. While he was indeed critical to the formation and maintenance of the group, it was Tolkien’s larger mythology, out of which The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, and The Silmarillion arose, that animated the group and continues to sustain its legacy.
Tolkien and the Inklings revives a legendary friendship that spanned the 1930s and 1940s, chronicling the storied group from the point of view of Tolkien and the other Inklings. Having fought in the trenches of World War I, Tolkien—like all of the Inklings—was acutely aware of the fragility of civilization. After witnessing the rise of fascism, national socialism, and communism, and sending their sons off to fight World War II, the Inklings resolved to mount a bardic defense of Western civilization from Socrates through Dante and beyond. Perhaps, just perhaps, myth and legend might reawaken the West to what it could be and to what it once aspired. Tolkien and the Inklings shows that the enduring power of these men comes from the strength of a friendship for the ages.
