Oh, to have been a fly on that wall.
Not that all of them were ever present at the Magdalen reading meetings: often no more than six or seven would turn up, while the rest preferred to save themselves for the more raucous social gatherings in the Oxford pub The Eagle and Child. Inkling James Dundas-Grant recalls a typical scene:
“we sat in a small back room with a fine coal fire in winter … back and forth the conversation would flow. Latin tags flying around. Homer quoted in the original to make a point … Tolkien jumping up and down, declaiming in Anglo-Saxon.”
“Down the pub with Tolkien and C. S. Lewis” - Times Online, a review of “The Company They Keep: C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien as Writers in Community” by Diana Pavlac Glyer.
Eage and Child. It’s a nice pub. Lewis and Tolkien were famous carousers and “old soaks”.
If you ever find yourself in Oxford, go visit the Eage and Child and raise a pint to the memory of the Inklings. Then go down a few doors to the Oxfam Book shop. I never fail to find a decent, now out of print theology book there.