The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings: J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Owen Barfield, Charles Williams

Obedience appears to me more and more the whole business of life, the only road to love and peace.

Far from breaking with tradition, they understood the Great War and its aftermath in the light of tradition, believing, as did their literary and spiritual ancestors, that ours is a fallen world yet not a forsaken one.

Fidelity in marriage requires self-will and self-denial.

A philosophy that cannot be lived is no philosophy at all.

Religion in art was a subtle business, best handled indirectly.

The teacher-student relationship evaporated, replaced by a rich and lively exchange of equals.

J.R.R. Tolkien, said a student, "could turn a lecture room into a mead hall in which he was the bard and we were the feasting, listening guests.

A letter Lewis wrote reveals an 18-year-old with the energy of a schoolboy and the tastes of an octogenarian.

The unavoidable harshness of life surprised none of them, for they were Christians one and all, believing that they inhabited a fallen world, albeit one filled with God's grace.

Tolkien said of himself that “I am in fact a Hobbit (in all but size),” he spoke the truth, not only about his material likes (trees, farms, tobacco, mushrooms, plain English food) and dislikes (cars, French cooking, early rising) but also about the disposition of his soul. He, like a hobbit, was at home in his shire; he, like a hobbit, trusted the cosmos—but not necessarily the powers that held sway on earth.

Everyone and everything needed to be raised to its highest level – the teacher must become a mage, the husband a knight errant, the labor a hero in a sacred drama – intensified, rarefied, baptized in the turbulent waters of restlessness, curiosity, and ardor.

A Christian's duty, Lewis believed, is not simply to tolerate "X" but to make life with "X" an occasion to work on one's own character flaws.

He loved his family, his friends, his writing, his painting; he knew their flaws, but they neither surprised nor embittered him.

Christians who like to write might do as a description of the genus. But the actual species shared more precise characteristics, including intellectual vivacity, love of death, conservative politics, memories of war, and a passion for beef, beer, and verbal battle.

A Christian atmosphere is no protection against preening egos.

J.R.R. Tolkien told a questioning correspondent, life's purpose is to know, praise, and thank God.

A translator must, of course, be an interpreter of cultures.

Imagination pointed toward truth but could not disclose it directly.

Words contain the "souls" or minds of people in the past; as such, they tell the story of consciousness.

Words are catch-basins of experience, fingerprints and footprints of the past that the literary detective may scrutinize in order to sleuth out the history of human consciousness.

One cannot underestimate boredom as an incentive to write.

She had responded to the loss of her husband, to poverty, to disease, and to family cruelty with boldness and ingenuity, by opening herself to others, especially to her children and her Church, pouring into these precious vessels her knowledge, hope, and devotion.

The Inklings were comrades who have been touched by war, who view life through the lens of war, yet who look for hope and found it, in fellowship, where so many other modern writers and intellectuals saw only broken narratives, disfigurement, and despair.

We must picture Oxford, during World War I, not as the neomedieval paradise it would like to be, but as the military compound it was obliged to become.

Oxford in the Inklings' day was not so different in look and smell from the Oxford of today. Then, as now, one was tempted to fantasize one's surroundings as a Camelot of intellectual knight-errantry or an Eden of serene contemplation. Then, as now, there was bound to be disappointment.

In a largely autobiographical paper Tolkien wrote in 1931 for the Oxford Esperanto Society (“A Hobby for the Home,” later entitled “A Secret Vice”), he would maintain that the making of a language necessitates the making of a mythology in which that language is spoken, that the two processes are intertwined, each giving rise to the other. People thought Tolkien was joking when he later said that he wrote The Lord of the Rings to bring into being a world that might contain the Elvish greeting, so pleasing to his sense of linguistic beauty, Elen síla lúmenn’ omentielmo (“A star shines on the hour of our meeting”). The remark is witty—but also deadly serious.

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.

After reading binge prompted by convalescence, "As if to balance the ledger, letters poured out at an equally prodigious pace.