BY JEB SMITH
Bradley J. Birzer. Tolkien and the Inklings: Men of the West. Encounter Books. December 2026. Hardcover, 320 pages.
Professor and historian Bradley J. Birzer, co-founder of the popular online journal The Imaginative Conservative, has completed a masterpiece in Tolkien and the Inklings: Men of the West. A prominent scholar, he has given us the best detailed examination of the famous academic group since Humphrey Carpenter’s essential The Inklings.
Birzer recounts the fascinating story of a group of literary giants, joined together in a common project. Writing as a first-rate scholar, historian, and biographer, Birzer presents not only the Inklings’ gatherings but also explores the individual works and lives of its members. He seamlessly weaves together their stories and philosophical and literary works, and so the reader encounters not just the men and their creations, but their lasting influence for generations to come. Birzer uncovers the various ebbs and flows in their relationships and how each member and their works impacted one another. Without Lewis and the Inklings, we wouldn’t have Middle-earth!
While Carpenter gives us a look at the Inklings through the eyes of C.S. Lewis, Bizer expands his focus to include not just the most well-known members such as Tolkien, Lewis, and Charles Williams, but also Lord David Cecil, Hugo Dyson, “Humphrey” Havard, Nevill Coghill, C.L. Wrenn, and more, as we are transported to Oxford and academia before, during and after WWII. Though he was a later addition to the group, the one thing I would have liked to see is more material on Christopher Tolkien.
This is not a surface-level take on the Inklings, but an encompassing deep dive into these great men, their works, and their influences on each other. It provides the ins and outs of all one would desire to know about the Inklings and of Inklings scholarship to date.
I think it takes someone of a similar mind to truly grasp another, and Bizer fits the old “men of the West” character as well as any Tolkien or Inkling scholar I am aware of. And his passion and love for the group that he describes as among the most influential literary men of the 20th century and one of the most preeminent forces for good in the modern world outside of the Church, is evident. Bizer portrays the Inklings as reactionary defenders of Western civilization and of the True, the Good, and the Beautiful. He “hits the mark” when it comes to understanding these great men, and thus we are given a purer, more accurate account of them and a clear view of their purposes, works, and worldviews.
One insight Bizer draws from the Inklings is their view that friendship and willing associations can help stave off modernity’s influences. The Inklings believed that close friendships are a counter to the dehumanizing, politically intrusive, and progressive society and the various nationalist and communist ideologies that emerged from it, such as fascism, Nazism, communism, and even, yes, what they viewed as authoritarian Western democracy arising after WWI. Bizer quotes C.S. Lewis, “That outlook which values the collective above the individual necessarily disparages Friendship; it is a relation between men at their highest level of individuality,” and “It withdraws men from collective ‘togetherness’ as surely as solitude itself could do; and more dangerously, for it withdraws them by two’s and three’s.” Further, as Lewis noted, every friendship is an act of opposition to a society that desires conformity and homogenization. And so not just their worldviews, their works, their subcreations, but the very existence of a group such as The Inklings was itself a small rebellion against modernity!
Conclusion
This book needs to be placed alongside Carpenter’s as a “must read” about the Inklings. Casual readers as well as scholars will find plenty of new insight and material to explore.
This book will immerse you in the Inklings, in Oxford, in the minds of these brilliant, unique thinkers, at the heart of the traditional West. But a warning is necessary; it might induce nostalgia, you might find yourself as I so often did, wishing you were there, at these meetings, with a pipe waving around as you speak like Professor Tolkien, and a beer in your hand, enjoying great debate and discussion as your mind is transferred not just to Middle-earth, to Narnia and other distant worlds, but to another time in our world, the old West, the world Tolkien and Lewis and his fellow members thought worth defending, and you will too.
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