The Inklings were historians

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Although The Inklings are usually considered to be a literary group, they were really much more like historians.

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With the exception of Robert 'Humphrey' Havard (scientist and doctor) all of the main members took an historical perspective on their subject: Tolkien was a philologist, Jack Lewis wrote about medieval literature and society, Charles Williams published several historical 'potboilers'  - and some, such as Warnie Lewis and Gervase Mathew - were straightforward historians, who wrote history books.

But the core Inklings had a specifically mythical interest in history.

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This was partly intrinsic to the individuals (and a major reason for their friendship), but found an early formulation in the first books of Owen Barfield  -  Poetic Diction and History in English Words which had a major impact on both Lewis (who had been friends with Barfield since they were undergraduate contemporaries) and Tolkien.

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The key activity shared by Lewis and Tolkien - and to very varying degrees by the other Inklings - was the recovery of the mythic vision of history.

That was what the Inklings meetings were about.

Yes they were a writing group, and a social group; but what was being written and what kept the group together around Lewis had this core, implicit, purpose and tendency.

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More importantly, it is why the group is still of interest today.

Because the problem for which mythic history is proposed as (at least the start of) a solution is by now very bad indeed, and much worse than in the 1930s and 1940s.

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The Inklings were not just historians, nor even historians of ideas: they were engaged in trying to reconnect the modern mind with an historical mode of thought, a mythic mode of thought - by argument, by scholarship, and of course by the imagination.

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