Tolkien and the Inklings

The Inklings were, to be sure, the most important literary group of the twentieth-century, rivaling and surpassing the much touted Bloomsbury Group.  They influenced not just the direction of literature—especially through fantasy, science fiction, and biography—but the very direction of western civilization itself.  It would not be too much of an exaggeration to note that former Communist countries rebelled using the language of the Inklings, but that the free west—from the U