Here's the scenario: you're a fly on a wall at the Eagle and Child pub in Oxford on Thursday night, and you encounter J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Owen Barfield and Charles Williams chatting about metaphysics. What do you say? Not much, since you're a fly after all. But even as a person, you would most likely be verklempt. In such fortune, enough satisfaction would come for the opportunity to at least eavesdrop.
Such was my experience to much extent reading The Fellowship. Lewis would coyly say, “We smoked, talked, argued, and drank together.” In a sense, that was all true. There was nothing fashionable about the Inklings. They were a small group of white men who got together to talk about religion, literature, and philology while smoking and eating unhealthy pub food. But I would have loved to have been a part of it!
Behind all the pub levity and intellectual quarreling, there was a intent of high aim through their writing. As the Zaleskis note, “their great hope was to restore Western culture to its religious roots, to unleash the powers of the imagination, to reenchant the world through Christian faith and pagan beauty.” This wasn't seen as a return to the past, as it was making the present more alive. These were challenging times with two major incessant wars that consumed their day. These men were restoring light through the darkness of modernity. Lewis, the former atheist, would go on the say, “Something inside me seems to be so intensely and burningly alive, and everything round me so starkly dead...”
“The members' shared Christianity also included a wide spectrum of views. Tolkien was Catholic, Barfield, Anthroposophist; Lewis, a "mere Christian"; Charles Williams, Anglican with a dash of ritual magic. Differences notwithstanding, the members were glued together by shared adherence to the Nicene Creed... and a shared set of enemies, including atheists, totalitarians, modernists, and anyone with a shallow imagination.” As such, they had much to work with. 
Instead of being overly sanctimonious, these men worked with cultural forms they had at their disposal. Tolkien emphasized recovery, escape, and consolation as a model for his imaginary epic tails. Lewis approached his novels similarly, but also a defended Christianity in his other books in a straightforward, rational way that didn't echo the preachiness of early-day chaplains. Barfield carved out an evolutionary framework that bridged science and spirit. And Williams brought in aspects of occult and idiosyncratic interests that intrigued people more interested with Christian mysteries and orders.
“That the Inklings may have been on the whole more decent and less vain than many other literary coteries can only be because they made a conscious effort to follow the path of real conversation.” And “the dispute over the exact nature of the Inklings —cabal or club?—has faded as history has stepped in with a third alternative: that whatever the Inklings may have been during their most clubbable years, today they constitute a major literary force, a movement of sorts.” Such movements may bring in something new, but as Lewis once said about humanity: “it has the privilege of always moving yet never leaving anything behind.”
Despite the happy endings they brought to their stories, they “were not optimists; they ... understood that sacrifices must be made and that not all wounds will be healed in this life. ... One may be as gloomy as Puddleglum or as convinced as Frodo that "All my choices have proved ill" without losing hope in a final redemption.” In the end, the only hope they could leave from a quaint pub to the modern world was a redemption of the Eternal.
All in all, their prolific contributions were nothing less than extraordinary. I wish I knew them.
All in all, their prolific contributions were nothing less than extraordinary. I wish I knew them.