I went to find Briana’s review of this book because it was how it got on my radar and it hit me that I left this book on my TBR list for 6 years. And I’m sure this isn’t the oldest book on my TBR list. But oh well, I am not systematic enough to go through all my books for this and tell you if this is the book from farthest back on my TBR list so let’s head straight into the review.

The Fellowship is a book about the Inklings, a literary society in Oxford where members read their work and received criticism. It’s most famous for the fact that J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis were members and that they read some of their most famous works there. The Fellowship focuses on the lives of four of these members – J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Owen Barfield, and Charles William – and traces the development of their literary careers.

While the book is supposed to focus on this four members, I thought the bulk of the book focused on Lewis and Tolkien. We’re given a pretty in-depth look into their lives and literary careers, tracing Lewis’s journey too Christianity and Tolkien’s struggle to complete the Silmarillion. I had never head of Barfield and Williams before, but the book also talks about them, their struggle for recognition, and the successes they achieved.

This wasn’t the main point of the book, but I found it answered a question that I had while reading Re-Enchanted, which is the influence of Chesterton on Lewis. Zaleski and Zaleski mention that Lewis has always been aware of Chesterton and one of his collections of essays was influential on his thought.

Interestingly, I didn’t think the Zaleskis spent much time on the Oxford vs Cambridge English school debate (which was covered quite extensively in Re-Enchanted). My impression of Lewis and Tolkien’s careers was that Lewis’s reputation as a Christan lay preacher (especially after his BBC talks during WWII) kept him at the level of a professor until he was elected chair at Cambridge, while Tolkien did not have such issues at Oxford. There isn’t much discussion of how different the English programs at these universities were, except for the fact that Cambridge emphasised literary criticism.

For me, the main value of this text was in getting to know Lewis and Tolkien outside of their most famous works. Lewis is well-stocked in Christian bookstores, and Tolkien’s works on Middle Earth are everywhere, but I didn’t really know much about their acadmic writing. By tracing their careers, I found a few books that I would want to read:

• The Allegory of Love by C.S. Lewis
• The Fairie Queene by Edmund Spencer (this is actually already on my TBR list but a reminder never hurts!)
• Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics by J.R.R. Tolkien
• Essays presented to Charles Williams by various authors
• English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, excluding Drama (part of the Oxford History of English Literature) by C.S. Lewis

More importantly, I gained a deeper understanding of both men, from Lewis’s controversial relationship with Mrs. Moore to Tolkien’s deep faith and increasing mistrust of machines. In fact, I wonder if the reason why the Lord of the Rings endures till today is because Tolkien “foresaw a greater [war] looming against Machines, by which he meant not only mechanization but a panoply of evil acts and inventions epitomized by automation and automatism“. We are in a world increasingly mechanised and digitised and are now realising the effects it has on us – Tolkien’s fears resonated with me and made me wonder if I would find new things in reading Lord of the Rings.

If you’re planning to read this, be prepared for a dense yet surprisingly conversational work. The Zaleskis cover pretty much everything the four Inklings write, including theology, literary criticism, and even philosophy (Elizabeth Anscombe was mentioned, and I actually recognised her name from the BBC In Our Time episode on her). They also unhesitatingly pass judgment on the various works mentioned, both good and bad; for example, they talk about how they think the Screwtape Letters could be better if it was half its current length – I don’t know if fans of the book would agree!

Overall, this was a lengthy and interesting read. I did wonder if it would be better to just cover Tolkien and Lewis, given that they are the most famous of the Inklings, but by the end of the book, I agreed that it helped to have Barfield and Williams in there to show how the Inklings influenced one another. I can’t say the book has tempted me to pick up Barfield and Williams’ work but as a whole, the book helped me to understand the environment that produced The Hobbit, The Chronicles of Narnia, and Lord of the Rings.