author : Sørina Higgins

This is the course guidebook that accompanies the 12 lecture “Great Course” of the same name. It is essentially an abbreviated transcript of each lecture, a few pictures, and some related reading. (I watched the lectures, which is what I am reviewing here, and am using the online book simply as an aide-memoire.)

This is a whistle-stop tour of the Inklings literary group, comprising a core of Lewis and his brother, Tolkein, Owen Barfield, and Charles Williams, with many more attending over the years. There is an examination of the influence of WWI, and each other, on their works. They were all religious (or somehow spiritual, even occultists), educated, lovers and producers of literature and poetry, and all men. They talked deeply, critiqued each others’ work; they argued passionately, had some fundamental disagreements (even at one point going so far as to say that one of the group should be burnt at the stake), yet had, for the most part, great fellowship.

One part that fascinated me was they way the entire group, and lots of other people, all agreed that Williams was one of the nicest, kindest, loveliest people they had ever met. They didn’t know he was the leader of a spiritual cult, and engaged in various BDSM rituals with his young female acolytes, not all of it consensual. Higgins says that when Tolkien discovered this, years later on reading a biography, he then claimed never to have known him well. I’m not sure what interpretation to put on this: either Tolkien was rewriting history, saying he never knew him, as in denying having spent those many long evening in deep conversations, or maybe he was realising his own limitations, that he never actually knew him, despite all those conversations.

I was interested in the discussion of Sehnsucht, or “longing”: a yearning for some unattainable state, evoked by nature and art, as illustrated by a certain kind of etherial nature art the Lewis brothers loved. Higgins says this feeling is what led Lewis to Christianity in the end. I also feel something of the same sort, also evoked by nature and art. It has not led me to religion, though, but rather to science: the study of nature through biology, mathematics, physics, and astronomy most strongly evokes, and partially satisfies, that feeling in me. But maybe that’s what drew me to the works of Lewis and Tolkien in the first place? Higgins’ descriptions of the works of the other Inklings do not leave me wanting to read them, however.