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entertaining in his gruff, exuberant way, taking the boys kite flying and catechizing them in the faith. But a middle-aged man cannot sate a teenager’s hunger for companionship, and Tolkien soon turned to his fellow students at King Edward’s, forming with three of them—Rob Gilson, Geoffrey Smith, and Christopher Wiseman—a club known as the Tea Club and Barrovian Society (TCBS for short), named after the shop (Barrow’s Stores) in which they met and the beverage that they drank while debating, as most sensitive young people do, religion, art, and moral behavior. All four were bright, idealistic, and a tad prudish; perfectly fitted to each other, they remained a tight-knit band until the Great War unraveled the fellowship. Within the TCBS, Tolkien came into his own, reciting from Beowulf , Pearl , and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight , urging his friends on to great artistic and moral heights, finding his voice in the loud, exuberant, sometimes boorish thrust-and-parry of male camaraderie—the milieu in which he and all the future Inklings achieved much of their work. “Friendship to the Nth power,” Tolkien called it.
    There was nothing odd in this; exclusively or primarily male clubs—from the local lepidopterist circle to the gentleman clubs of London to the Royal Society—had dominated English social and intellectual life for centuries. Often these associations devoted themselves to pastimes such as gambling, drinking, or hunting, but nobler pursuits, literature in particular, inspired more than one celebrated private club. Early models for the TCBS (and for the Inklings), at least some of which Tolkien and his friends may have been aware of, include the seventeenth-century Friday Street Club at the Mermaid Tavern in Cheapside, with its boisterous Elizabethan roster of Ben Jonson, John Donne, and Francis Beaumont, a paradise of male society immortalized two centuries later by John Keats in his “Lines on the Mermaid Tavern” (“Souls of poets dead and gone, / What Elysium have ye known, / Happy field or mossy cavern, / Choicer than the Mermaid Tavern?”); the early eighteenth-century Scriblerus Club, a Tory group led by Alexander Pope, Jonathan Swift, John Arbuthnot, and others, which Colin Hardie, himself an Inkling, identified as a prototype of the Oxford group; and, later in the eighteenth century, Samuel Johnson’s dinner-and-discussion circle, generically entitled “The Club,” with Joshua Reynolds, Oliver Goldsmith, Edmund Burke, and “Asiatic” Jones among its members, which convened every Monday at Turk’s Head Tavern in Soho and was designed, according to Bishop Thomas Percy, to “consist of Such men, as that if only Two of them chanced to meet, they should be able to entertain each other without wanting the addition of more company to pass the Evening agreeably”—a fair description, too, of the TCBS and the Inklings at their best. As Keats’s poem and Bishop Percy’s remarks suggest, these clubs offered grand things: escape from domesticity, a base for intellectual exploration, an arena for clashing wits, an outlet for enthusiasms, a socially acceptable replacement for the thrills and dangers of war, and, in the aftermath of World War I, a surviving remnant to mourn and honor fallen friends. Tolkien and his fellow Inklings made much of these opportunities, and clubs and fellowships loomed large in their lives and in their fiction.
    But male company, however convivial and stimulating, could not meet all needs. Tolkien, sometimes accused of ignoring women in his fiction, sought them out in life, in their manifold roles as mother, lover, companion, guide: first Mabel, then the Blessed Virgin, then a young pianist with smoldering eyes by the name of Edith Bratt, who stole his heart. She was nineteen, he sixteen, when they met amid the drab hunting prints and overstuffed furniture of a middle-class boardinghouse. That she was older than he troubled them not at all; they shared an orphan’s