C.S. Lewis and fellow Oxford writers used the collective name The Inklings for their literary discussion group.
The Inklings were an informal Oxford literary group active mainly during the 1930s and 1940s. Members and regular participants included C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, Charles Williams, and Owen Barfield. They met to read aloud and discuss works in progress, poetry, theology, and imaginative literature.
The group was not a formal society with a fixed membership list or published manifesto. Its meetings were associated first with Oxford settings and later especially with The Eagle and Child pub, known to members as the Bird and Baby. The name “Inklings” had been used earlier for a student literary group connected with Lewis, but it became famous through the Oxford circle.
Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings and Lewis’s fiction are often linked to these meetings, but the Inklings did not jointly write those books. Their importance lay in criticism, encouragement, and conversation among writers who were developing their own independent works.