Gems from the Letters

[The Squatter of Amon Rûdh]

The meetings of the Inklings at the Eagle and Child in Oxford are well known, and a framed testimonial on the wall of the public bar records their having drunk the landlord's health. C.S. Lewis was for a time a fellow at nearby Magdalen College and kept a pair of slippers behind the bar. Here Tolkien recounts a chance gathering of several of his friends there and its aftermath in a letter to his son Christopher, then serving overseas with the R.A.F.

On Tuesday at noon I looked in at the Bird and B[aby] with C. Williams. There to my surprise I found Jack and Warnie [1] already ensconced. (For the present the beer shortage is over, and the inns are almost habitable again). The conversation was pretty lively - though I cannot remember any of it now, except C.S.L.'s story of an elderly lady that he knows. (She was a student of English in the past days of Sir Walter Raleigh [2]. At her viva [3] she was asked: What period would you have liked to live in Miss B? In the 15th C. said she. Oh come, Miss B., wouldn't you have liked to meet the Lake poets? No, sir, I prefer the society of gentlemen. Collapse of viva.) - & I noticed a strange tall gaunt man half in khaki half in mufti with a large wide-awake hat, bright eyes and a hooked nose sitting in the corner. The others had their backs to him, but I could see in his eye that he was taking an interest in the conversation quite unlike the ordinary pained astonishment of the British (and American) public at the presence of the Lewises (and myself) in a pub. It was rather like Trotter [4] at the Prancing Pony, in fact v. like. All of a sudden he butted in, in a strange unplaceable accent, taking up some point about Wordsworth. In a few seconds he was revealed as Roy Campbell (of Flowering Rifle and Flaming Terrapin). Tableau! Especially as C.S.L. had not long ago violently lampooned him in the Oxford Magazine, and his press-cutters miss nothing. There is a good deal of Ulster still left in C.S.L. if hidden from himself. After that things became fast and furious and I was late for lunch. It was (perhaps) gratifying to find that this powerful poet and soldier desired in Oxford chiefly to see Lewis (and myself). We made an appointment for Thursday (that is last) night. If I could remember all that I heard in C.S.L.'s room last night it would fill several airletters. C.S.L. had taken a fair deal of port and was a little belligerant (insisted on reading out his lampoon again while R.C. laughed at him), but we were mostly obliged to listen to the guest. A window on the wild world, yet the man is in himself gentle, modest and compassionate. Mostly it interested me to learn that this old-looking war-scarred Trotter, limping from recent wounds, is 9 years younger than I am, and we prob. met when he was a lad, as he lived in O[xford] at the time when we lived in Pusey Street (rooming with Walton the composer [5], and going about with T.W. Earp, the original twerp, and with Wilfred Childe [6] your godfather - whose works he much prizes).

Letter #83 (6 October, 1944)

1: C.S. Lewis and his brother Warren
2: Walter Alexander Raleigh, Chair of English Literature at Oxford, 1904-22.
3: Viva voce (literally 'with the living voice') - an oral examination.
4: Strider was originally a hobbit
5: Sir William Walton (1902-1983)
6: W.R. Childe, a colleague of Tolkien's at Leeds and author of many poems

[EDIT: It has come to my attention that the letter framed on the wall of the Eagle and Child is in fact a photocopy taken from a book, which has nothing whatsoever to do with the pub. Clearly I was misled by a clever piece of P.R. trickery. I will update this post this evening with more precise details, since I'm fairly sure that my misconception was based on something I read about the Inklings.