Welcome to ASTU 400Y – War, Folklore and the Mythos of the Inklings
This first page is intended to give a brief overview of the course, and some of the main learning objectives I have outlined for our seminar. ASTU 400Y-001 is a Student Directed Seminar, which means a significant portion of the course evaluation will rely on active participation, and constructive feedback among your peers. This is an opportunity for students to foster a collaborative learning environment among other budding academics with similar research interests; this seminar is also designed for each of you to customize your learning experience. Projects have been designed so that you have multiple opportunities to develop your own research topics, and engage with the material in a unique way. For more information on assignments, please see the Assignments page of this blog.
Reading List: the Syllabus is subject to change, and the most updated version can be found here; the main texts we will be working with include the following:
- Green, Roger Lancelyn. King Arthur and His Knights of the Round Table (1953)
- Lewis, C. S. The Screwtape Letters (1942) and selections from Mere Christianity (1952)
- Tolkien, J. R. R. The Silmarillion and selections from Tales from a Perilous Realm
- Williams, Charles. All Hallows Eve (1945)
Additional Selections from the works of Owen Barfield and W. H. Auden will be provided; see the Syllabus for details.
Structure of the Course: Each of these texts will be supplemented by secondary source material, in order to prompt discussion, and provide historical and cultural context for each work. This seminar assumes that all students either have read, or at least have a familiarity with, both C. S. Lewis’s The Chronicles of Narnia and J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. These are not the core texts, but they are foci from which the lesser-known works of these two authors will be discussed.
Schedule: Seminar meetings will be held Tuesdays and Thursdays 3:30-5:00 PM in BUCHANAN D213, and will be structured as follows: the first half hour will be spent on context, discussing an assigned secondary source reading or a student-led Critical Report. An hour of each class will be focused on the literature assigned for the given day, as guided by student Discussion Question assignments.
Course Overview
This seminar will examine the historical, theological and philosophical impacts of the Great War on the aptly-named Inklings, a post-war group of Oxford scholars including such names as J. R. R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, Charles Williams, Owen Barfield, Roger Lancelyn Green, the poet W. H. Auden, among others. Their two most notable members, Tolkien and Lewis, both served on the Western front, and their works are imbued with themes of loss, rebirth and hope in the wake of two world wars. Resisting the cynical disillusionment of the Modernists, the Inklings were far more than Christian conservative patriots; they were idealists and reformers, empowered by their antiquated fascinations with old tongues and lexicography, folklore and mythos – or what Inkling biographers Philip and Carol Zaleski define as “the regenerative power of story.”
The Inklings first met at Oxford during the 1930s, a decade of Depression and post-war trauma in England; this was as much an inter-war period as it was an inter-genre, literary limbo. The medieval revivalism and Romanticism of the Victorian era, producing writers such as William Morris, Alfred Lord Tennyson, and George MacDonald, was giving way to Modernism; T. S. Eliot in The Waste Land and The Hollow Men meditated on the futility and destruction of war, and Wilfred Owen mocked that “old Lie: Dulce et decorum est/ Pro patria mori.” The Inklings uniquely held to, and even restored, chivalric romance, Scandinavian and Anglo-Saxon epics, and the possibility of a God-given victory during these dark times for Britain; some scholars have suggested that both Tolkien and Lewis were working to build a “new mythology” for their countrymen, and that the Inklings’ antiquarianism was part of an active, cultural resistance against Modernism – its cynicism, technologies, and sense of alienation.
Using the works of Lewis and Tolkien as the centerpiece for its exploration of the Inkling corpus, this seminar will also highlight its other, lesser-known members, including Williams, Barfield, Green and Auden. There will be three main units structured around these authors. First, Tolkien’s Silmarillion and select Tales from the Perilous Realm, in tandem with a few of his essays and some secondary scholarship, will inform our discussion of what myths and legends are – narrative recreations of the past, origin stories, and points of orientation in Tolkien’s war-torn present. This unit will conclude with selections from the Arthurian legends of Roger Lancelyn Green, and a guest lecture by Dr. Sîan Echard. Second, we will discuss the works of C. S. Lewis in the context of his faith, exploring the way that Christianity has also functioned as an origin-story – one which was blurred by skeptics, extremists, and scientific theory during the Modernist period. His Screwtape Letters and selections from Mere Christianity, reveal a conflicted, yet resolute adherence to Christian doctrine. Third, we will be looking at William’s All Hallow’s Eve to discuss the crisis of modernity in the early twentieth century, and how its repercussions reverberated though subsequent literature in the post-war period.
Finally, C. S. Lewis once stated that there were only two conditions for joining the Inklings: you had to be a man, and you had to be Christian. How does this challenge our more “modern” ideas of secularism, gender equality and diversity? How did the Inklings retain their antiquarianism, and conservatism, in the face of a Modernist repudiation of the past, and tradition? Comprised of theologians, lexicographers, mythographers and poets, the Inklings exchanged drafts, ideas and criticism for over twenty years – leaving a legacy of thought, literature and theory which is not only still relevant, but is central to Western culture.