The Fellowship

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

By: Philip Zaleski, Carol Zaleski

Narrated by: John Curless

A stirring group biography of the Inklings, the Oxford writing club featuring J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis.

C. S. Lewis is the 20th century's most widely read Christian writer and J. R. R. Tolkien its most beloved mythmaker. For three decades they and their closest associates formed a literary club known as the Inklings, which met weekly in Lewis' Oxford rooms and a nearby pub. They read aloud from works in progress, argued about anything that caught their fancy, and gave one another invaluable companionship, inspiration, and criticism.

In The Fellowship, Philip and Carol Zaleski offer the first complete rendering of the Inklings' lives and works. Lewis maps the medieval mind, accepts Christ while riding in the sidecar of his brother's motorcycle, becomes a world-famous evangelist and moral satirist, and creates new forms of religiously attuned fiction while wrestling with personal crises. Tolkien transmutes an invented mythology into a breathtaking story in The Lord of the Rings while conducting groundbreaking Old English scholarship and elucidating the Catholic teachings at the heart of his vision. This extraordinary group biography also focuses on Charles Williams, strange acolyte of Romantic love, and Owen Barfield, an esoteric philosopher who became, for a time, Saul Bellow's guru. Romantics who scorned rebellion, fantasists who prized sanity, Christians with cosmic reach, the Inklings sought to revitalize literature and faith in the 20th century's darkest years - and did so.

©2015 Philip Zaleski and Carol Zaleski (P)2015 Recorded Books

Well worth a listen

Get to know the foremost members of the Inklings. The authors are thorough and easy to follow. The narration is excellent. A combination of biography, history, thought and literature in twentieth century Oxford.

An erudite and compelling listen

As an overview and guided journey through the literary development of each of the prominent members of the Inklings, this book excels. The authors weave together many different story strands together into a compelling and detailed narrative. The experience left me with a deeper sense of connection to the Inklings as writers and people: their motivations, foibles and complexities. There are some odd pronunciations by the reader, but overall, the performance was engaging and well-paced.

a pleasant way to learn about Lewis & Tolkien

If you want some insight into how CS Lewis and JRR Tolkien became the men who wrote their famous works, you'll find that out and more. I finished with a greater apreciation for their place in the literary world. Barfield and Williams do not receive the same exposure, but their place in the lives of Lewis and Tolkien opens the door to their own creativity. I enjoyed it all.

Inspiring and highly informative

This is the best treatment of the Inklings I know of. It's worth the price for each of its biographies of Lewis, Tolkien, Williams, and Barfield alone. But it's much more than that. If you want to appreciate their achievement as a group, then this book is for you. The reader is excellent, too, and makes listening to it being read a pure joy.

Very Thorough and Pleasantly Long

This work benefits from being longer than many studies (including Humphrey Carpenter’s) of the Inklings, and the authors use their well spent time to enlarge on peripheral characters. Despite negative reviews above, there is not too much time wasted on summaries of literary works and each summery succinctly adds to a necessary understanding of each character’s philosophy.
I greatly appreciated the enlarged view of a group every literary student should study.
The narrator was awesome!