Overcoming the Great Divorce I: The Inklings

The Notion Club, as depicted, was informal and vague in outline. A number of characters appear in the dialogues, some rarely or fitfully. – The Notion Club Papers, in J.R.R. Tolkien. Sauron Defeated: The History of Middle Earth Volume IX. ed. Christopher Tolkien (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1992), 158. Around 1931, an Oxford student group, founded by future BBC radio broadcaster E. Tangye Lean, met to discuss each other’s ongoing literary efforts. They would read aloud what each had written, and then discuss it, hoping to for it to be criticized so they could hone each other’s emerging literary skills. It is one of many such groups which have come and gone at universities throughout the world. It would have been as forgettable as the rest, save for two important facts. The first is that the group was sponsored by C.S.... [read full story]