BETWEEN 1930 and 1947, a bunch of men — academics, editors, doctors, students — met twice weekly at Magdalen College and within 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 concerning the gathering: most were middle-aged family men, with college teaching responsibilities, talking loudly of the politics of the university, or arguing over topics akin to the usage 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 author. Then there’s Nevill Coghill, the person whose translation of Chaucer you most likely read in school. Two more stand out: that one they call Tollers together with his tweed jacket and waistcoat? That is J. R. R. Tolkien, now considered one of the world’s most famous writers, creator of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. And the person calling the meeting to order? That’s his friend, C. S. Lewis, generally known as Jack, creator of The Chronicles of Narnia, the science fiction Ransom trilogy, and lots of books of Christian apologetics.
These men — roughly 17 in number — were the Inklings: a casual group of like-minded friends who met to share their writing. They had in common that they were men of the educational class, living in Oxford, and all were Christians. In our more diverse age, it’s fair to ask: what can they possibly need to teach us?
Describe them one other way and so they stop looking so uniform and comfy. They were veterans of the First World War, survivors of the Somme. Orphans. Converts from Atheism. Catholics and Protestants. And, in a single case, a working-class Londoner with an interest within the occult (Williams). They were friends with Dorothy L. Sayers and T. S. Eliot, and formed a literary circle that proved to be not less than as influential because the contemporaneous Bloomsbury Group. How? They were very inspired and really entertaining. They remade fantasy and revolutionised it. They took their faith seriously — and had a good time 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 mirrored image and a Bible reading to prompt further thought. We consider Wardrobes and Rings may have something to say to Christians in addition to those that wouldn’t give themselves that label. All are welcome aboard to search out out what that is likely to 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, author, and singer-songwriter; and an authority 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 school, 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, whilst you resist some desires, what it’s that you just truly desire, then Lothlórien in Middle-earth is a very good place to go to during Lent. There is a paradox concerning the important characters’ experience of entering Lothlórien. On the one hand, it’s an interval of much-needed rest and healing, after the horrors of Moria. It is a spot where they will get in contact with and express their grief on the lack of Gandalf. But it is usually a spot of clarified vision, and for that very reason it’s a place and time of testing: testing and clarifying their inner desires — learning, in the sunshine of latest insight, to discern the best path. As Galadriel says, “Seeing is each good and threatening.”
For it’s in Lothlórien that every member of the corporate is held in Galadriel’s all-seeing gaze and offered a selection. As Tolkien writes: “All of them felt that they had been offered a selection between a shadow stuffed with fear that lay ahead, and something he greatly desired. . .” And, happily, each of them chooses aright; each is in a position to proceed their quest with a clearer sense of what they’re doing and why — even Boromir at this point.
A LESSER creator would have left it at that: an inviolable and ethereal elf-maiden tests, almost tempts, them, in order that they will see and deliberately select the best path. But Tolkien does something much more profound; for on this chapter Galadriel herself is tested and tried, almost unwittingly, by Frodo, when he freely offers her the Ring. She sees immediately, greater than Frodo does, what’s at stake — for her, for the entire quest, and so for the entire of Middle-earth. As Galadriel says to Frodo: “Wise the Lady Galadriel could also be, yet here she has met her match in courtesy. Gently you might be 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 assume what it will mean for her to simply accept his innocent offer. She sees a picture of herself as a queen, “beautiful and terrible because the morning and the night”. But, perhaps because she has confessed the need and allowed herself to assume it for a moment, she also sees that it will lead to not 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 virtually unbearable peril and tension, she says: “I pass the test. I’ll diminish and go into the West and remain Galadriel.”
In Tolkien’s vision of things, the best in addition to the least are subject to temptation; and he knows this, in fact, because he knows that even Christ himself was thus tempted, and that he, too, passed the test, and he, too, selected to put aside false glory, to diminish, to proceed on his true quest, to empty himself and take the shape of a servant, and be obedient even unto death.
AND here is one other paradox. A little bit earlier within the chapter, Galadriel says, about herself and Celeborn, “Together we’ve fought the long defeat.” And for any Christian, a selected Christian life, refusing the false temptations and blandishments of power, can feel like a protracted defeat. But, in our willingness to fight the long defeat, to make the alternatives that appear to diminish us, to see evil appear 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 because the cross is the one technique to resurrection.
“What do you would like?” Frodo asks her. “That what must be, shall be,” she answers. There is not any higher watchword for a Christian; for it’s one other way of claiming, “Not my will, but thy will likely 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 so that you can say to God, “Thy will likely be done”? Have there been times when taking the simple path has turned out to be the incorrect turn? What lets you discern God’s will to your life?
MG
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.
