Diana Glyer’s The Company They Keep: C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien as Writers in Community has won the Northeast Tolkien Society’s 2007 Imperishable Flame Award for Tolkien/Inklings Scholarship. Her book tells the story of the Inklings, the writers group that met in Oxford through the 1930’s and 1940’s to read their work aloud and offer feedback. The group’s 19 members included Tolkien, author of The Lord of the Rings, and C. S. Lewis, author of the Chronicles of Narnia. 

Nominees for The Imperishable Flame are named by the Northeast Tolkien Society. This year, the winners were chosen by readers of the Journal of the Northeast Tolkien Society, participants in the NETS Yahoo online group, and visitors to the Herenistarion.org website.

Northeast Tolkien Society chairs Anthony S. Burdge and Jessica Burke told winners, “We see your work as an inextinguishable light amongst the rest, guiding future generations to further understanding and education, leaders in community functions and creativity.”  

The Company They Keep has received enthusiastic reviews from the Times Literary Supplement, Green Man Review, Mythlore, Mythprint, the SF Site, and Tolkienlibrary.com. It was named a Core 1000 book by Yankee Book Peddler, and a recommended title by the American Library Association’s Choice magazine.

Diana Glyer’s exploration of the Inklings shows how many ways that the members of this group encouraged, critiqued, and on occasion, even rewrote each other’s work. For example, after Tolkien asked for feedback on a long poem Lewis not only criticized it but actually re-wrote several sections of it for him. When Tolkien abandoned all hope of finishing The Lord of the Rings, Lewis took him to lunch and made him promise to write more of the tale. And unforgettably, Charles Williams, an Inkling, once wrote a poem that prompted Lewis to write a letter saying that his work was getting to be so good, “I’ve a good mind to punch your head when next we meet.”