The Inklings were an informal social and literary fellowship active in Oxford during the middle of the twentieth-century, chiefly celebrated for its most prominent members, C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien. The club, some scholars have argued, was the mortar in which, by the pestle of “prolonged, fierce, masculine argument” (Lewis Essays xi) such works as Lewis's Space Trilogy and Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings were partly shaped. The group took its name from an existing undergraduate club at Oxford, organized by one Edward Tangye-Lean in the early 1930's. Tolkien would later refer to the name as “a ‘jest' because it was a pleasantly ingenious pun in its way, suggesting people with vague or half-…

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Citation: Fisher, Jason. "The Inklings". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 11 November 2008 [https://staging.litencyc.com/php/stopics.php?rec=true&UID=5551, accessed 23 November 2024.]