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An Evening with the Inklings - JRR Tolkien · Mythmakers

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  My name is Colin Jurya.
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  It all started when I was in Pramskall, in one of the classes we were reading around C.S.
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  Losers book me a Christianity.
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  I'd never heard of C.S. Lewis and I was gripped by his style.
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  I wanted to read all his books and it was through him that I came across the name Tolkien.
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  And that interested me because I've got a French surname and I thought, ah, he's somebody
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  with a Germanic surname, that's interesting.
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  And then of course I'll be appeared and I read that and then I went off to Istanbul for
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  two years at the University of Istanbul and it's there that I read the Lord of the Rings
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  borrowed the books from the British Council Library and that's where it all started.
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  And I started writing articles, an article on Tolkien which I called Leonardo Tolkien
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  and Mr. Baggins and I given it as a talk and I did this kind of an assay for as part
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  of my course at the University and then I, it was sent, I met somebody who was from the
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  American University and he was just there for a year, I transferred the two and he sent
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  it off, he said, could I send it off to Clyde Kilby in Wheaton College who had met Tolkien
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  and spent a summer with him actually to help him when he was working on his, on his,
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  this, the Silmarillion and that and Clyde Kilby asked if he could send it on to California
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  because there was lots of interest in Tolkien there, you know, it was kind of hippie era
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  and it appeared in a, a fanzine basically about Tolkien which was a very interesting one and
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  and that was my first big article on, on Tolkien and that's where it all started and
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  and then since then I've written quite a few books on Tolkien and his friends,
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  yes Lewis and and and I've also veered towards Harry Potter and others but I just like,
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  you know, very much like fantasy writing and and that was something that drew me in and
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  and one of the earliest books I wrote was on the friendship between Tolkien and Lewis which
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  interested me greatly and Tolkien after the First World War he came back to Oxford and he worked
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  for a while on the the big English dictionary, I think it was called the English dictionary that
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  I can't remember the exact name that it had but he was given work on the W section of it and
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  which I think he enjoyed very much and was very much akin to his his knowledge of philology and
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  and and the history of words it was very much his delight to do that and after that he he got a
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  job as a professor at Leeds University where he very much enjoyed teaching the students and
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  and and after a while he then got a professorship in Anglo-Saxon here in Oxford to Pembroke College
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  and it was a year after that that he met C.S. Lewis who had not long after Tolkien had started as
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  a Donut model in college teaching in English and he also taught some philosophy and other subjects
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  but English was his was his great love especially going back to medieval literature and he also
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  was very knowledgeable through his study on classics and he was very wide wide wide wide red and
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  but they met at an English tea as it was called here in Merton College to talk about the you know
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  teaching English at the university presumably and so that's where Lewis started to
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  chatting with with with Tolkien and afterwards he he quite liked him and he thought he was okay
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  but he needed a kind of a slapple so and then he would be all right he had an interesting way of
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  interacting with each other that's right so how did the inklings come about what was the origin
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  of that well it grew over a period it eventually started off from from friends and knew each other
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  some of them were friends at Lewis had made as an undergraduate and they came a point when
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  there was a group of students that started a group called the inklings one of them was a brother
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  of a famous filmmaker and but anyway they they were and it was a very mixed group of people it
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  wasn't they weren't all just oxardons or professors and so on they were a mix and and they weren't
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  all teaching the same subject they weren't all to say teaching English literature but various
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  subjects and one for example one of the early members of the group was CS Lewis's GP
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  to Dr. Humphrey Havard well the Humphrey was a nickname from one of the other inklings which
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  happened a lot they liked to play around with words all the time that was part of it they loved
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  talking and the another idea behind it was a lot of them were were writing starting to write I mean
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  I went off with for example written a number of things very important books and they also there
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  was a lot of conversation about what people were writing they would give feedback to it rather like
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  a writers club that we have in this country and other places which are very helpful I know when
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  when I was lived in Lester I went to an excellent writers club and I learned a lot from it because
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  I was writing a variety of kind of books and I would get feedback and I can understand why the
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  inklings was so attractive to young scholars or you know people that were entering into the academic
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  world or into a teaching world or whatever and would again a lot from it so it wasn't till about
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  1933 that the inklings were given that name well actually the name was never printed anywhere
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  but that seems to be when the names started anyway and so it grew out of friendship and Lewis was
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  very and it was very much around CS Lewis it is a rather amusing letter that Charles Williams during
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  the war time when he had to come to Oxford you know as an evacuee in a sense working for Oxford's
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  university press and he would write quite a lot of letters to Dorothy Alseas who was a friend of hers
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  and Lewis said that she knew nothing about the inklings but in one of the letters
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  the Williams talked about the the group being like a court a court of the king and the king of
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  course was CS Lewis and it was quite amusing to have the have the inklings described in that way
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  and there's lots of different ways that you can describe them but the fact is that they were
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  real human beings and they were interacting with friends and they and there there was one or two
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  bumps bumps in it for example Hugo Dyson who was one of the important members of the group
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  he rather disliked the Lord of the Rings and Tolkien was reading and reading many many chapters
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  from the Lord of the Rings was being written and Dyson didn't like it at all and he had a veto
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  to stop people just talking about Alse and fairies and things like that and it was quite funny
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  well in one occasion Dyson was later arriving which was quite something happened quite a lot
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  and they'd got down to listening to Tolkien reading another chapter and you know very important
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  section where everybody was following it and Dyson burst into Lewis's rooms and immediately
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  the veto came into what the stop they stopped listening to Tolkien had to stop and then they got on
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  so they were a very I mean they were a very interesting group of people and they came a time when
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  they stopped reading and they continued discussion groups in pubs so it became more of a
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  conversational group after that although there was lots of conversation at the time when the
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  reading was done by various people as well you know centered around what had been read and the
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  conversational side of the group it's just as important as the reading in my in my view anyway
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  having having researched as much as I could so what do you think the inkling's meant to
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  Tolkien do you think he would have written his works without it I think they were very important
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  to him I think to have a listenership to what he was writing because he knew he was going into
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  ground that was I mean he knew that in the medieval period people would have fantasy and supernatural
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  beings and so on but it was a very different world that he was in and to have a group of people
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  that listened to him and responded to it and at the time when his book came out to his friend
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  C.S. Lewis wrote some blurb about it and Tolkien actually was a bit worried in case no I think
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  Lewis was a bit worried because he thought there may be some people who didn't like him it might
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  have a bad effect on the Tolkien book but so if there was one thing by Tolkien everyone should
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  read what do you think where would you start what age you're referring to an adult adults I think
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  they should start reading the Hobbit it's quite a good I say it was a bit contentious is it do you
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  start with Lord the Rings or the Hobbit because the Hobbit being a children's book and for people
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  off yeah that's the first book of Tolkien I read as soon as I got hooked via Lewis I saw the Hobbit
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  in the W.A. Smiths and bought it and I was when I was traveling to Istanbul I was reading it on
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  the journey and I just fell in love with it and then I found that the the Lord it led to the Lord
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  of the Rings and else the next step so in in terms of starting it's a difficult question but
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  the fact is that the films by Pete Jackson have encouraged many people to to read I think the
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  the sales of the Lord of the Rings have gone up and quite a bit since those films came out I
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  mean some people didn't like the films you know I remember when I was walking through a street in
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  Lester I belonged to a small Tolkien group then and and one of the people there he was almost
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  in tears he'd just seen the film and he said it wasn't so horrible and I said well I really liked it
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  I thought you know films are very different medium to to writing books and then I said that Peter
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  Jackson had done a very good job and so it probably that would be a good place for people to start
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  the Lord of the Rings. Thanks for listening to MythMakers podcast brought to you by the Oxford
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