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"The world is like a drunken peasant. If you lift him into the saddle on one side, he will fall off again on the other side." Thus Martin Luther in his Table Talk. His words would serve well as a description of the history of Inklings scholarship. The earliest such scholarly studies argued that the Inklings (Lewis, Tolkien, Charles Williams, Owen Barfield, et al.) were possessed of "a corporate mind" and that their works had a "similar orientation," "essentially uniform," "clearly defined." So claimed John Wain, a junior member of the Inklings, and various others. But this consensus was toppled from the saddle by Humphrey Carpenter, who maintained, by way of contrast, that the Inklings showed "scant resemblance" to one another and "that on nearly every issue they stand far apart." Carpenter's view, which he bolstered with evidence from senior Inklings who themselves claimed not to have influenced one another at all, has sat lumpenly in place since he published his study in 1979.
Diana Pavlac Glyer has now toppled the Carpenter view. But rather than allowing the cycle of drunken saddlings and re-saddlings to repeat itself, she has thoughtfully poured buckets of clear cold water over the entire subject. Fully sobered up at last, Inklings scholarship is for the first time able to sit straight, inclining neither to the view that the group was reliably homogeneous, nor to the view that its members were utterly immiscible. Thesis. Antithesis. Synthesis. It's a typical scholarly progression. But how long it has taken!
Glyer's study brings together in an admirably balanced way all previous work on this hugely significant circle of writers and establishes itself as an indispensable and refreshingly commonsensical guide to the group's internal workings. She analyses the Inklings using a five-fold grid, assessing how the members of the group served as resonators, opponents, editors, collaborators, and referents.
Superbly researched and crystal clear, this work does the difficult job of assessing just how much the Inklings owed to one another. It demonstrates convincingly that some of the 20th century's most powerful cultural artifacts would have been significantly different without the input of the group. For instance, Glyer shows that The Lord of the Rings would have been much more like The Silmarillion in structure and style "if it had not been so strongly influenced by the 'humanizing' effect of the Inklings." Given that The Lord of the Rings has repeatedly been voted Book of the Century in public polls, and given the extensive reach of the Peter Jackson film adaptation, this is a much more important point than at first it might seem. How many people have read The Silmarillion? Who can imagine a successful screen version of it? Without the Inklings, Glyer argues, The Lord of the Rings would have lingered in similar obscurity.
Glyer herself recognizes that there are some areas of enquiry that she is leaving unaddressed. For instance, the massively important question of allegory is intentionally left out of account. Certain other large-scale issues, such as myth, sehnsucht, and "semantic unity," are only handled briefly, and Glyer frankly admits that "a full discussion" of such topics "would require chapters in their own right." Still, if this study doesn't explore these big issues of mutual influence, it does explore the big issue of influence itself. This is one of the reasons why the book is so satisfying. After two hundred pages of close analysis and detailed argument, the final chapter swells to a grander theme, one which is treated judiciously and carefully, but now allargando with theological echoes.
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