Atla’s products now include four journals focusing on one or more Inklings (aka “the Oxford Christians”), a group of Christian writers based in Oxford, England. C.S. Lewis (1898-1963), J.R.R. Tolkien (1892-1973), Charles Williams (1886-1945), and Owen Barfield (1898-1997) were the core members of the group, who met throughout the 1930s and 1940s to read from unfinished works, especially of fantasy literature, that they were in the process of writing. Among these works in progress were those later published as The Lord of the Rings and The Chronicles of Narnia.
The first of the Inklings journals to be indexed in Atla Religion Database® (Atla RDB®) was VII: Journal of the Marion E. Wade Center (1980-) at Wheaton College. This annual serial is named for the seven writers collected at the Marion E. Wade Center, which includes the four above-named Inklings, as well as George MacDonald (1824-1905), G.K. Chesterton (1874-1936), and Dorothy L. Sayers (1893-1957). In 2019, the Oxford University Press-published Journal of Inklings Studies (2011-) was added to AtlaSerials® (Atlas®). While these are both excellent titles, I want to focus on the two most recent Inklings journals added to Atla’s products: Sehnsucht and Mythlore.
Sehnsucht: The C.S. Lewis Journal (2007-) was added to Atla RDB at the end of 2023. This open access journal was established by the Arizona C.S. Lewis Society and is now published by George Fox University and Wipf & Stock. The German word in its title, often translated as longing, yearning, or desire, was frequently used and discussed by C.S. Lewis, especially in his autobiographical Surprised by Joy (1955).
Although Mythlore (1969-) was added to Atla RDB in 2020, it has now been licensed for full-text inclusion in Atlas PLUS and I’m currently in the process of indexing it back to the first issue. Begun as a fanzine by the Mythopoeic Society in Los Angeles, Mythlore has become increasingly professional and scholarly over the years and is now a peer-reviewed, open access journal published by Southwestern Oklahoma State University. It focuses on the fantasy writings of Lewis, Tolkien, and Williams, but also fantasy fiction in general, especially on what it refers to as mythopoeic literature. As the name suggests, this literary genre integrates mythological themes and archetypes into fiction.
In its early days, the Mythopoeic Society attracted a motley assortment of hippies, nerds, scholars, and oddballs. Members did cosplay before it was cool, helped popularize Renaissance fairs in southern California, and participated in the Society for Creative Anachronism. As Mythlore editor Glen Goodknight reflected in 1988, “The Mythopoeic Society has almost reached its majority, and we have seen many changes and growth experiences since it started nearly 21 years ago. We began in 1967, which historians of popular culture are now calling ‘The Summer of Love.’ It was a year of love-ins and flowerpower, unusual dress and new ideas. There was a hard to define excitement in the air, and a feeling that new things were possible. We began with a picnic in September to celebrate Bilbo and Frodo’s Birthday. In a public park in Los Angeles people came as their favorite Tolkien characters, to sing, play games, eat, and judge costumes.”
In addition to peer-reviewed articles, book reviews, and poems, Sehnsucht includes reviews of films and plays about C.S. Lewis or adapted from his works, while Mythlore includes fantasy art, letters to the editor, and columns on a variety of topics. Alexei Kondratiev ‘s column “Tales Newly Told” discusses new works of fantasy fiction, while Paul Nolan Hyde’s “Quenta Lambardillion” analyzes, transcribes, and translates Tolkien’s artificial languages and scripts. While letters to the editor are typically excluded from the database, I did index one early letter by philosopher Peter Kreeft published in the fourth issue of Mythlore.
Both Sehnsucht and Mythlore are particularly noteworthy for the unpublished manuscripts they have edited, published, and brought to light. Sehnsucht, for example, has published an unfinished romance by C.S. Lewis called “The Quest of Bleheris” (1916), a short story by his father Albert Lewis, as well as letters of Lewis and his brother Warren. Mythlore has published Charles Williams’ final, unfinished novel “The Noises That Weren’t There,” as well as Tolkien’s poem “Narqelion” (1916), written in an early form of Quenya, or High-elvish.
Mythlore is also a bibliographer’s delight. Joe R. Christopher (later joined by Wayne G. Hammond and Pat Allen Hargis) compiled an idiosyncratic series of fifty-seven Inklings bibliographies from 1976-1998. It is idiosyncratic because in addition to scholarly works, Christopher’s bibliographies include Inklings-influenced novels—even jigsaw puzzles. Another interesting series of bibliographic articles, by George H. Thompson, collects early reviews of Tolkien’s books published in a wide variety of magazines and newspapers.
There are many ways to find these records in Atla’s database products. Most obviously, one could start by searching the names of individual authors. There is also the subject heading “Inklings (Group of writers)”. One could also limit search results by journal title, but there are plenty of articles and book reviews pertaining to the Inklings in other journals, such as Christianity and Literature. Other commonly-used subject headings include: “Christian literature, English,” “Fantasy fiction,” “Fantasy literature,” “Literature and myth,” “Fairy tales,” “Creation (Literary, artistic, etc),” “Arthurian romances,” and “Apologetics.” For works on Tolkien’s languages, search “Languages, Artificial” and “Language and languages in literature.” The Library of Congress has two subject headings for specific Tolkien-created languages, “Quenya (Artificial language)” and “Sindarin (Artificial language)”, which I have added to Atla’s thesaurus. And because Tolkien invented writing systems to go with his languages, I also created the new subject heading “Artificial scripts” to describe them.
It has been a true delight to index these journals for the Atla Religion Database. And there are many more like them that might be added in the future. Happy reading!
Tolkien’s drawings included in the featured image were taken from this source.
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