‘The Fellowship’ Of Four Literary Legends

The fellowship of the old masters of fantasy. C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien and their literary club, “The Inklings.”

Carol Zaleski, professor of world religions at Smith College. Co-author, with Philip Zaleski, of the new book "The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings." Also co-author of "Prayer" and "The Book of Heaven." (@carol_zaleski)

Philip Zaleski, religious scholar and editor of the "Best Spiritual Writing" series. Co-author, with Carol Zaleski, of the new book "The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings." Also co-author of "Prayer" and "The Book of Heaven."

Los Angeles Times: J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, and 'The Fellowship' of fantasy writers -- "In a pub in Oxford there lived some writers. Not nasty, dirty decadent writers, whose books were filled with intimations of sex and an oozy smell, nor yet dry, bare Modernists with a horror of heroics or fantastical things: These Oxford writers were Inklings, and that means heterosexual white male Christians who created some of the most enduring works of 20th century fantasy."

Salon: Love “Game of Thrones?” Thank “unfashionable” Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, who went against the grain and conquered pop culture — "For nearly 20 years in the middle of the 20th century, a small group of men met twice a week in the British university town of Oxford. They drank, they smoked, they told the occasional off-color joke and they sang a lot of very old songs. They also read aloud to each other from works they’d written, stories and papers that they believed to be radically out-of-step with their time. Everything about the greater world around them conspired to persuade them that what they valued and enjoyed was either doomed or already obsolete. One of them happily described himself as a 'dinosaur.' Yet they would go on to shape global culture in ways we still feel today."

Christian Science Monitor: 'The Fellowship' follows C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, and friends through their defense of fantasy -- "Who were the Inklings, exactly? This is a difficult question to answer. The cast of characters shifted frequently, with some (the man of letters Lord David Cecil) attending sporadically and others (the mystery writer Dorothy Sayers) existing just on the outskirts. In simplest terms, the Inklings was a literary and social club, a group of male friends – women weren’t allowed – who met weekly at Oxford from the 1930s to the 1950s in order to discuss their shared loves."

https://www.scribd.com/doc/268183094/Excerpt-From-The-Fellowship-By-Carol-and-Philip-Zaleski

Jen Trolio, deputy culture editor at Vox. (@jeffur)

Vox: Game of Thrones' Shireen scene reveals a huge problem with the show — "Episodes like 'The Dance of Dragons' are why I'm beginning to think about Game of Thrones as a collection of engineered moments, rather than as an ongoing epic. I'll come right out and say it: I didn't much care for this jam-packed penultimate installment of season five, and not just because of the Shireen stuff (which I'll get to in a minute)."