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The Inklings
C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien,
Charles Williams and their friends
Humphrey Carpenter
HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd.
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
This edition 2006
First published in Great Britain by George Allen and Unwin 1978
Copyright © George Allen and Unwin (Publishers) Ltd 1978, 1981
Humphrey Carpenter asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
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Source ISBN: 9780007748693
Ebook Edition © MAY 2017 ISBN: 9780007381241
Version: 2017-05-12
Signatures of some of the Inklings, sent to Dr Warfield M. Firor in 1948, after he had given them a ham (by permission of the Trustees of C.S. Lewis)
Dedicated to the memory of
the late Major W. H. Lewis
(‘Warnie’)
CONTENTS
1 ‘Oh for the people who speak one’s own language’
4 ‘The sort of thing a man might say’
2 ‘A tremendous flow of words’
2 ‘We had nothing to say to one another’
C. S. Lewis died in 1963, J. R. R. Tolkien in 1973, Charles Williams in 1945. In recent years the books of the first two have been immensely popular on both sides of the Atlantic, while Williams, though his name is far less well known, continues to exercise a considerable fascination to those who have encountered his writings.
These three men knew each other well. Lewis and Tolkien met in 1926 and soon achieved an intimacy which lasted for many years. Around them gathered a group of friends, many of them Oxford dons, who referred to themselves informally and half jestingly as ‘The Inklings’. When in 1939 Charles Williams found himself obliged to move from London to Oxford he was quickly taken into this circle, and was on close terms with Lewis and the others until his death.
The