In the Oxford of the 1930s through the 1960s, C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, Charles Williams, Owen Barfield, Warnie Lewis, Hugo Dyson, and others met in Lewis’s rooms at Magdalen College and at the Eagle and Child pub to read their writing aloud to one another. They believed that stories, myths, and poetry could do the slow cultural work that treatises and position papers could not, and they gave one another the company to keep writing them.
“Hwæt! We Inclinga. We have heard in old days
of the wisdom of the cunning-minded Inklings;
how those wise ones sat together in their deliberations,
skilfully reciting learning and song-craft,
earnestly meditating. That was true joy!”
— J.R.R. TOLKIEN (Translation of a verse fragment composed in Anglo-Saxon)
