The Great Tower of Elfland

"Beginning in the mid-1950s, scholars proposed that the Inklings were a unified group centered on fantasy, imagination, and Christianity. Scholars and a few Inklings themselves supported the premise until 1978, when Humphrey Carpenter wrote the first major biography of the group, disputing a unified worldview. Carpenter dedicated an entire chapter to decry any theological or literary unity in the group, arguing disagreement in areas of Christian belief, literary criticism, views of myth, and writing style. Since Carpenter{u2019}s The Inklings, many analyses of the Inklings--and even their predecessors--have continued to show disunity rather than unity in the group. This text overturns the misapplication of a divided worldview among two Inklings, J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis, and their forerunners, G. K. Chesterton and George MacDonald. Analyzing their literary, scholarly, and interpersonal texts, The Great Tower of Elfland clarifies the unities of their thinking through five general categories: literature and language, humanism, philosophy of the personal journey, philosophy of history and civilization, and their Christian mythopoeia. After responding to scholarly arguments that diffuse worldviews, this text introduces some of the literary and interpersonal exchanges among the authors to demonstrate their relationships before examining the popular and lesser-known writings of each to clarify their literary and linguistic theoretical orientations."--Provided by publisher.