The Inklings Variety Hour

New Charles Williams Poems!

In this special edition of The Inklings Variety Hour, Sørina Higgins joins me to discuss an exciting discovery she made while perusing Charles Williams' manuscripts at the Marion E. Wade Center.

Come to hear about the new Charles Williams poetry and manuscripts; stay to hear a brief discussion about whether Williams should be "canceled." 

Follow Sørina's work at https://theoddestinkling.wordpress.com/, and feel free to support her work at https://www.buymeacoffee.com/higginssorina. 

And let me know your thoughts! Email me at inklingsvarietyhour@gmail.com.  

The Inklings Variety Hour will be back in March (or so) for a fourth season! In the meantime, enjoy occasional bonus episodes like this. Next up, we'll be having a crossover episode with William O'Flaherty's "All About Jack" podcast for the new, official C.S. Lewis Reading Day (November 29). 

I'll also be promoting a Christmas book my wife and I have written. We'll see you then!

Barfield, Tolkien, and ”Splintered Light,” with Verlyn Flieger

Verlyn Flieger rejoins me to talk about her first important work--and really the first very important work on J.R.R. Tolkien's The Silmarillion--Splintered Light: Logos and Language in Tolkien's World.

I was really excited to have this conversation, as I read this book just under two decades ago and it not only introduced me to Barfield's ideas, but also made The Silmarillion far more interesting and meaningful to me than it had been. 

So, enjoy, and thanks so much to Verlyn for coming on the show again.  It's been such an honor and a treat to be able to talk with her.  

I'm about out of podcasts!  With the semester starting up, this may well be the final podcast of the season--but I intend to return for Season 4, probably sometime in March.  You'll probably have a few scattered podcasts from me before then, so watch this space!

I've pretty much run out of regular co-contributors, and I worry that the nature of this podcast suffers if it's mostly interviews with published experts (fun as those are), book promotions, or me just talking on my own.  This should be primarily friends talking about good books (and many, many thanks to all the friends who have joined me here)!

If any listeners would like to join me to discuss a book (say, The Silver Chair or The Man Who Was Thursday, or something else), just say the word.  I'd love to have you chime in for an episode or two at the very least.

As always, email me at inklingsvarietyhour@gmail.com or give the podcast a rating on iTunes.  

Thanks for listening!

Dawn Treader: Retreaded, with Children

Sorry for the late post!  Sorry also that this is mostly (but not entirely) old material.  Despite that, it took a long, long time to edit!

I wasn't happy with the way the audio turned out in Part 2 of Voyage of the Dawn Treader earlier this season, so this is my attempt to rectify that!  It should be much easier to hear us talk--with a lot less deafening music and waves.  Also, if you have a long drive ahead of you, stick us on--we'll cover all of Voyage of the Dawn Treader.

You can listen to Part 1 (with David Bates and Eric Geddes), Part 2 (with Eric Geddes), as well as all new bonus material featuring the three Pipkin kids, whose patience I test with attempts at Socratic seminar on VODT--as well as attempts to get them to sit still.  I'd say they give about as well as they get.

The material with my kids is pretty heavily edited.  You're welcome.

As always, email me at inklingsvarietyhour@gmail.com.  

Thanks again to David Bates and Eric Geddes, and thanks to Logan Huggins for mixing the first episode.

Next time: Tolkien scholar Verlyn Flieger joins me to at last talk about Owen Barfield--and his influence on Tolkien.  We'll discuss her landmark study, Splintered Light.

Shall These Bones Breathe? by Sørina Higgins

Chris speaks with Dr. Sørina Higgins about her developing short story collection, Shall These Bones Breathe?

We also talk a bit about writing and the creative process. 

If you'd like to read Sørina's stories--and even help shape them--just go to www.buymeacoffee.com/higginssorina

For more on her scholarly work, check out her blog, The Oddest Inkling.

If you enjoy The Inklings Variety Hour, please do leave us a review or send me note at inklingsvarietyhour@gmail.com. I'd love to hear from you.

Next week: I'm not entirely sure. Hey, it's like you're in a real Inklings meeting, where anything might happen. Perhaps Charles Williams or his ghost will show up--or a big ham from America. Or maybe we'll finally talk about ancient semantic unity and/or "more $%#@ing elves." Man, now I'm intrigued--as well as anxious to live up to all this hype. Stay tuned!

Promo: ”Ghost Food” by Chris Pipkin

Just a quick ad for a story I've published in Flash Fiction Magazine.  You can find it here.

Enjoy! If you like it and want to support a collection of similar stories I'm developing, just go here.

The Shire

Sophie Burkhardt joins me to talk about the nature of Tolkien's Shire and its role in his work.

(No long episode description this time--I am on vacation.  Enjoy, though!)

If you have additional thoughts about the Shire, or ideas about other places we should explore, drop us a line at inklingsvarietyhour@gmail.com.  We would love to hear from you.  I think it would be half worth it to do a second episode somewhere down the line on the Shire, as there is so much else to talk about.  Let me know your thoughts.

Give us a rating on iTunes if you can spare a minute. A kind review would mean a great deal to us.

Sophie's podcast, Beneath the Willow Tree, can be found here.

Next time, we'll be talking about Sørina Higgins' developing short story collection, Shall These Bones Breathe?  Check it out and support her work here.

Tolkien Among the Ruins: ”The New Transcendentalism”

Jonathan Geltner joins the show once again to discuss his essay, "The New Transcendentalism."

We ask, and attempt to answer the question: "What would Western society look like if it was rebuilt only around the works of Tolkien?"

We're not sure ourselves, but there would probably be a lot more smoking. 

Spoilers: We don't ever quite answer this question, but we do speculate about it quite a bit, covering topics from "How 'true' did Tolkien think his own legendarium was?" to "Is Tolkien's secondary world self-contained enough that no context is necessary to appreciate it?"

If you have more concrete ideas about what a Tolkien-based culture would look like, we'd love to hear them. Email the podcast at inklingsvarietyhour@gmail.com

Check out Jonathan's stuff here, here, and here.

Next time: Sophie Burkhardt joins me to talk about the Shire!

Tolkien’s The Fall of Arthur

If you liked this episode, give us a rating and review on iTunes so that other people can find us.  We'd love to hear from you, so reach out to me at inklingsvarietyhour@gmail.com.

This week, Jonathan Geltner joins Chris to talk about J.R.R. Tolkien's unfinished King Arthur poem, The Fall of Arthur, indulging in discussions of medieval literature 

Among other things, we discuss:

• Why you should never tell an author that they must finish a work (thanks a lot, R.W. Chambers!)
• The plot of The Fall of Arthur
• The Arthurian "chronicle" tradition in medieval literature (Geoffrey of Monmouth, Wace, Layamon, and the Alliterative Morte Arthure
• Who is the historical Arthur?
• The Britons versus the English
• What "Wales" means
• Tolkien's not-so-cordial dislike of French
• Tolkien's focus on the natural world
• Lancelot and Gawain
• Tides as time in Tolkien
• Guinever as fay-woman
• Old English prosody in The Fall of Arthur
• Images and phrases in this work that prefigure LOTR
• Mordred's agents: The first Black Riders?

Sorry for the late posting!

Next week, we'll be talking about Jonathan's essay--a thought experiment about what would happen if we had to restart civilization with only Tolkien's work.  Feel free to read it here before we discuss: The new transcendentalism (III): fragments or foundations? (substack.com)

Feel free also to follow Jonathan at Slant Books, and to purchase his debut novel, Absolute Music.

Roger Lancelyn Green’s King Arthur

Sorry for the late post--it just didn't sit right to publish an episode on the most iconic British monarch during my country's Independence Day celebration. Also, there were hot dogs.

If you like this podcast, please give us a five-star rating on iTunes. We'd also love to hear from you, so please reach out--inklingsvarietyhour@gmail.com!

Friend of the show Eric Geddes returns to talk about Lewis' friend and student, Roger Lancelyn Green, who was best known for the many children's books he wrote about myths and legends, many of which remain standard.

After briefly discussing Green's friendship with Lewis, we talk about Green's King Arthur and His Knights of the Round Table, which Lewis called "better than Malory," before adding, "well, not really, but you know what I mean."

High praise indeed!

Topics and works discussed include:

• Roger Lancelyn Green's biography
• His friendship with Lewis
• Some of his best-known works.
• Lewis' Discarded Image, dedicated to Green
• Tolkien's annoyance with Narnia, revisited
• Diana Glyer's The Company They Keep
• The Collected Letters of C.S. Lewis, ed. by Walter Hooper
• Sir Thomas Malory versus Roger Lancelyn Green...
• ...versus Dave Pilkey (or, Pipkin's unhinged "get-off-my-lawn" rant about kids' books these days)
• The two swords of Arthur
• Monty Python, of course
• Odds Bodkin's Perceval
• Chretien de Troyes versus Roger Lancelyn Green
• The Holy Grail
• Galahad versus Perceval
• When the holy and the fairy converge
• Is it a foregone conclusion that Camelot (and all civilizations) would fail--and is it one that a Christian is obliged to make?

Digressive and rambling, as usual, but come along for the ride and you'll probably have fun.

Also--are there other Inklings or topics you would like to hear us discuss?  Let us know!

There will be more on King Arthur (as written by Tolkien) very soon. Thanks for listening!

Exploding Lewis Myths with Harry Lee Poe (Becoming C.S. Lewis)

If you're enjoying the show, please do rate us on iTunes!  Also, we'd love to hear from you at inklingsvarietyhour@gmail.com.

Hal Poe joins the show to discuss his comprehensive and very readable three-volume C.S. Lewis biography, Becoming C.S. Lewis, which you can find here. He talks about how he became interested in C.S. Lewis, the process of writing the biography, and a few of the assumptions about C.S. Lewis he's disproven.

Among other things, we discuss:

• The importance of Lewis' childhood in forming his tastes
• The Janie Moore affair (or lack thereof?)
• Biography versus memoir
• Lewis' love of allegory and his Allegory of Love
• Lewis' likely influence on Tolkien's Hobbit and Lord of the Rings
• Barfield: The Inkling Who Wasn't
• Some objections to the Planet Narnia thesis
• C.S. Lewis as Mrs. Moore's house elf
• Lewis' writing speed
• Apologetics after Lewis

We hope you enjoy it!  Thanks again to Hal Poe for taking the time to discuss this with us--and thanks to Andrew Lazo for introducing us!