The Eagle and Child - Literary Connections

Literary Connections

The Inklings was an Oxford writers' group which included C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, Charles Williams and Hugo Dyson. From late 1933, they met on Thursday evenings at Lewis's college rooms at Magdalen, where they would read and discuss various material, including their unfinished manuscripts. These meetings were accompanied with more informal lunchtime gatherings at various Oxford pubs which coalesced into a regular meeting held on Mondays or Tuesday lunchtimes at the Eagle and Child, in a private lounge at the back of the pub known as the 'Rabbit Room'.

The formal meetings ended in October 1949 when interest in the readings finally petered out, but the meetings at the Eagle and Child continued, and it was at one of those meetings in June 1950 that C.S. Lewis distributed the proofs for The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.

The membership of the Inklings changed over the years, Tolkien, for example, drifted away from the meetings in the late 1950s. But Lewis, who had lived around Oxford since 1921, was a central figure until his death in 1963. The Eagle and Child was modernised in 1962, with the pub being extended to the rear. The Rabbit Room's former privacy was inevitably destroyed leading to the group's reluctant change of allegiance to the Lamb & Flag at the other side of St Giles.

More recently, the pub was regularly frequented by Colin Dexter, who created Inspector Morse, and is still frequented by Diarmaid MacCulloch. The pub featured in the Lewis episode "Allegory of Love".