From the 1930s to the 1940s, C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, and their friends and fellow writers met to share good fellowship and their creative works-in-progress. Known as the “Inklings,” they produced some of the most beloved works of the 20th century.

Join Diana Pavlac Glyer, author of The Company They Keep: C.S. Lewis & J.R.R. Tolkien as Writers in Community, as she invites us to explore the Inklings’ friendship and the influence it had on their lives. She will encourage us to respond to God’s call to community and discover that we are refreshed and inspired as we connect with others.

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Another successful April Fools Day comes and goes.  I couldn’t have asked for a better response than the one that was given by the amount of press that we received from our three major April Fools Day jokes this year.

For our wrap up this year, Jonathon and I are collaborating on this story. We’re both weighing in on the response to the stories that I can take no credit for.  Jonathon is a genius, and he is THE genius behind the April Fool’s Day jokes this year and last.

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Two of the biggest Christian actors are slated to star in a film about two of the 20th century’s most prominent Christian writers. Actors Kirk Cameron (Growing Pains, Left Behind, and Fireproof), and Mel Gibson (Lethal Weapon, Braveheart and The Passion of the Christ) are slated to star as C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien in an upcoming still untitled movie.

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The C.S. Lewis and Inklings Society is now accepting registrations for its twelfth annual meeting on March 26-28, 2009, addressing the theme “Inklings: Dinosaurs or Contemporaries?” and featuring plenary speaker Peter Schakel. See below for more details. Please click here to see the seminar schedule (as a PDF). A detailed schedule will be available mid-February.

In papers and plenary sessions, the conference will explore ways in which C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, Owen Barfield and Charles Williams may (or may not) be particularly relevant to the literary, theological, philosophical and socio-political issues of our own early 21st century times. As in previous conferences, we would like to extend the conversation to include Dorothy Sayers as well, and we would like to open the conversation even a bit further this year by including G.K. Chesterton, a strong-minded proto-Inkling of sorts, in the mix. What might this diverse and pleasantly provocative circle of thinkers have to offer to the world of ideas that we find ourselves in?

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Jo-Anna wrote in to remind us about Silver Leaves.  Our very own Jonathon Svendsen has an article in this issue, and we’re very proud of that:

Tolkien-based journal “Silver Leaves” Issue Two, has released as of Saturday, Jan. 10. The theme is The Inklings and we are very excited about getting it into folks’ hands. It’s a superb issue, with contributors including Douglas Gresham, Colin Duriez, Brian Sibley, and Jef Murray, along with many others. Ordering information is at www.whitetreefund.org.

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There is magic in the last line of The Lord of the Rings. To recap: the stolidly courageous Sam Gamgee, having watched his best friend, Frodo Baggins, sail towards the Grey Havens and into a kind of death, is left to walk back to the Shire where he finds his wife and children waiting with the promise of a quiet life far from the slaughter of the War of the Ring. J. R. R. Tolkien finishes with the sentence: “‘Well, I’m back,’ he said”. It is a touchingly understated conclusion which returns the prose to the homely simplicity of the inaugural chapters after the archaic epic mode of The Return of the King.

However, as Diana Pavlac Glyer tells us in her scholarly and perceptive study The Company They Keep, this is not how Tolkien originally intended to finish his trilogy. He had in mind a further epilogue, set sixteen years after the events of the rest of the book, which would have provided another, superfluous glimpse into Gamgee’s domesticity. In this ultimately excised version, a grey-haired Sam reads stories of his adventures to his children, spinning them tales of wizards and orcs and walking trees. There is even the faint suggestion that Sam has been narrating the story of The Lord of the Rings itself, before, at last, we depart the Shire for good, leaving Sam and Rose in a state of connubial bliss, tale-telling by the fireside.

What stopped Tolkien from publishing this ending was his membership of the Inklings – that renowned circle of Oxford writers and academics who met for seventeen years from 1932 and which counted C. S. Lewis, Charles Williams and E. R. Edison, the author of The Worm Ouroboros, among their number. It was they who pointed out the glutinous sentimentality of the scene, marshalling their forces to argue that it added nothing of substance to a narrative which had already swollen far beyond the “second Hobbit” requested by his publishers. Glyer suggests that this incident typifies the way in which the Inklings affected one another’s work, despite the fact that in later years its members were frequently to insist that their meetings acted more as a social club than a writers’ circle, brushing aside any suggestion of real influence.

Down the pub with Tolkien and C. S. Lewis

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Calvin College, in Grand Rapids, MI, invites you to a lecture called: “Are the Chronicles of Narnia an Evangelistic Text?”

Thursday, December 15, 2005

Calvin Theological Seminary Auditorium
10:00 a.m. – 11:00 a.m.

FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC

Guest speaker John Bowen is Associate Professor of Evangelism in the Pastoral Department at Wycliffe College, University of Toronto, and is also the Director of the Institute of Evangelism. His interests include lay leadership, spirituality in movies and the theology of C.S. Lewis and the Inklings.

The Calvin College community is warmly invited to attend!

After the event, Professor Bowen’s lecture will be available online. Visit the Calvin Seminary Continuing Education page and click on Lecture Archives.

[Calvin Seminary Continuing Ed]
[Download the Lecture (Real Audio Format - available at Real.com)]

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