BETWEEN 1930 and 1947, a group of men — academics, editors, doctors, students — met twice weekly at Magdalen College and in the pubs of central Oxford, their regular being the Eagle and Child. Imagine sitting across the bar from them. At first glance, there was nothing remarkable about the gathering: most were middle-aged family men, with college teaching responsibilities, talking loudly of the politics of the university, or arguing over topics such as the use of language or 18th-century French history. So far, so very Oxford.
Look closer. That slight man with the cockney accent: that’s Charles Williams, a poet and novelist with an original mind. That friendly-looking chap with glasses and a pipe: that’s Owen Barfield, philosopher and writer. Then there’s Nevill Coghill, the man whose translation of Chaucer you probably read at school. Two more stand out: that one they call Tollers with his tweed jacket and waistcoat? That is J. R. R. Tolkien, now one of the world’s most famous writers, author of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. And the person calling the meeting to order? That’s his friend, C. S. Lewis, known as Jack, author of The Chronicles of Narnia, the science fiction Ransom trilogy, and many books of Christian apologetics.
These men — roughly 17 in number — were the Inklings: an informal group of like-minded friends who met to share their writing. They had in common that they were men of the academic class, living in Oxford, and all were Christians. In our more diverse age, it is fair to ask: what can they possibly have to teach us?
Describe them another way and they stop looking so uniform and comfortable. They were veterans of the First World War, survivors of the Somme. Orphans. Converts from Atheism. Catholics and Protestants. And, in one case, a working-class Londoner with an interest in the occult (Williams). They were friends with Dorothy L. Sayers and T. S. Eliot, and formed a literary circle that proved to be at least as influential as the contemporaneous Bloomsbury Group. How? They were very inspired and very entertaining. They remade fantasy and revolutionised it. They took their faith seriously — and had fun with it, too.
This Lent series picks on themes that emerge from their work, particularly that of Tolkien and Lewis. Following weekly themes to suit the Lenten season, we go from temptation to the cross, via time, creation, conversion, and the importance of story. Using the springboard of the Inklings, we include a reflection and a Bible reading to prompt further thought. We believe Wardrobes and Rings will have something to say to Christians as well as those who wouldn’t give themselves that label. All are welcome aboard to find out what that might be.
Julia Golding is a multi-award-winning novelist and director of the Oxford Centre for Fantasy, a small educational charity established to honour the life, work, and faith of the Inklings.
Malcolm Guite is a Life Fellow of Girton College, Cambridge; priest, poet, writer, and singer-songwriter; and an expert on the Inklings, Tolkien, and C. S. Lewis.
Professor Simon Horobin is Fellow and Tutor in English at Magdalen College, Oxford, holding the position that C. S. Lewis held at the college, and has lectured and published widely on C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien. His latest book is C. S. Lewis’s Oxford (Bodleian Publishing).
Galadriel and the Ring
J. R. R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring
IF LENT is a time for setting things aside, seeing more clearly, discerning, even as you resist some desires, what it is that you truly desire, then Lothlórien in Middle-earth is a good place to visit during Lent. There is a paradox about the main characters’ experience of entering Lothlórien. On the one hand, it is an interval of much-needed rest and healing, after the horrors of Moria. It is a place where they can get in touch with and express their grief at the loss of Gandalf. But it is also a place of clarified vision, and for that very reason it is a place and time of testing: testing and clarifying their inner desires — learning, in the light of new insight, to discern the right path. As Galadriel says, “Seeing is both good and perilous.”
For it is in Lothlórien that each member of the company is held in Galadriel’s all-seeing gaze and offered a choice. As Tolkien writes: “All of them felt they had been offered a choice between a shadow full of fear that lay ahead, and something he greatly desired. . .” And, happily, each of them chooses aright; each is able to continue their quest with a clearer sense of what they are doing and why — even Boromir at this point.
A LESSER author would have left it at that: an inviolable and ethereal elf-maiden tests, almost tempts, them, so that they can see and deliberately choose the right path. But Tolkien does something far more profound; for in this chapter Galadriel herself is tested and tried, almost unwittingly, by Frodo, when he freely offers her the Ring. She sees immediately, more than Frodo does, what is at stake — for her, for the whole quest, and so for the whole of Middle-earth. As Galadriel says to Frodo: “Wise the Lady Galadriel may be, yet here she has met her match in courtesy. Gently you are revenged for my testing of your heart at our first meeting. You begin to see with a keen eye.”
And then she confesses openly to him and to herself that her heart has greatly desired the Ring, and for a moment she allows herself to imagine what it would mean for her to accept his innocent offer. She sees an image of herself as a queen, “beautiful and terrible as the morning and the night”. But, perhaps because she has confessed the desire and allowed herself to imagine it for a moment, she also sees that it would lead not to joy, but to despair: “All would love me and despair.” And then, having summoned the vision, she has the grace, the self-sacrifice, to dismiss it, and, after a moment of almost unbearable peril and tension, she says: “I pass the test. I will diminish and go into the West and remain Galadriel.”
In Tolkien’s vision of things, the greatest as well as the least are subject to temptation; and he knows this, of course, because he knows that even Christ himself was thus tempted, and that he, too, passed the test, and he, too, chose to set aside false glory, to diminish, to continue on his true quest, to empty himself and take the form of a servant, and be obedient even unto death.
AND here is another paradox. A little earlier in the chapter, Galadriel says, about herself and Celeborn, “Together we have fought the long defeat.” And for any Christian, a chosen Christian life, refusing the false temptations and blandishments of power, can feel like a long defeat. But, in our willingness to fight the long defeat, to make the choices that seem to diminish us, to see evil seem to wax so strong and goodness seem so weak, to refuse the weapons of the enemy even for what seems a noble fight, that very renunciation is itself the victory, just as the cross is the only way to resurrection.
“What do you wish?” Frodo asks her. “That what should be, shall be,” she answers. There is no better watchword for a Christian; for it is another way of saying, “Not my will, but thy will be done.”
Reflection Re-read the Lord’s Prayer (Matthew 6.9-13). Have there been times in your life when it has been hard for you to say to God, “Thy will be done”? Have there been times when taking the easy path has turned out to be the wrong turn? What helps you to discern God’s will for your life?
Wardrobes and Rings: Through Lenten lands with the Inklings is published by Canterbury Press at £12.99 (Church Times Bookshop £10.39); 978-1-78622-690-7.
