The Oxford literary group that included C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien was called the Inklings.
The Inklings were an informal discussion group rather than an official society with a fixed membership list. Writers and academics met to read aloud from works in progress, discuss literature, and debate ideas. Lewis and Tolkien were among its best-known members, alongside figures such as Charles Williams and Owen Barfield.
The group met in Oxford locations including Lewis’s rooms at Magdalen College and the Eagle and Child pub. The pub was traditionally nicknamed the “Bird and Baby,” and it became strongly associated with the group’s meetings.
The Inklings did not write a shared manifesto or publish as a collective. Their importance comes from the conversations and mutual criticism that supported works such as Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings and Lewis’s fiction.