Location
The Eagle and the Child - the New Home of the Brown Collection
A room on the lower level of the Zondervan Library has been renovated to provide a new location for the Edwin W. Brown Collection, a collection of books, manuscripts, letters and other materials relating to the lives and works of C. S. Lewis, George MacDonald, Dorothy L. Sayers, Charles Williams and Owen Barfield. This new room will give the collection more visibility and accessibility. This will allow regular hours to be scheduled when the collection may be seen, explored and used for research.
The antique English pub furniture on the South wall of the room is a gift from Ed and Pat Brown. Dr. and Mrs. Brown collected the furniture to decorate their basement room that housed their collection of books, which was the beginning of this collection. The pub sign is also a gift from the Browns. It is a replica of the sign that hung outside The Eagle and Child pub at the time Lewis and his friends met there. This furniture gives the room the atmosphere of the Eagle and Child and is symbolic of the fellowship Lewis enjoyed with his friends and Oxford colleagues. It was a fellowship characterized by lively conversation, sometimes light and sometimes profound. Our hope is that this room will be a place where today's scholars may experience the same kind of fellowship as they study and discuss the works of these authors.
There is nothing else quite like an English Pub. Pub is short for Public House and traditionally, an English pub was a place where people from the village or neighborhood met to socialize with their friends. Although a pub serves alcoholic beverages, it is also a place to enjoy good food. It still is one of the best food buys for lunch when traveling in England. In the days before general literacy, the sign outside a pub would let people know its name. This room is a combination of a study room and a museum so it is fitting that the pub furniture suggests the historical setting where Lewis and his friends met.
The Inklings, as these friends of Lewis called themselves, met in his rooms at Magdelen College on Thursday evenings and at the Eagle and Child on Tuesdays. The Inklings was an informal group and the membership changed over the years as people moved in or out of Oxford. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien were the two most famous Inklings but, of course, none of them were famous when the group first started to meet. Some of the other Inklings were Charles Williams, Warren Lewis, Christopher Tolkien, Owen Barfield, David Cecil, Neville Coghill, Hugo Dyson, and R. E. Havard.
The connection between Lewis and The Bird and Baby has been noticed even in popular detective fiction. In The Secret of Annexe 3 by Colin Dexter is the following passage:
In the back bar of the Eagle and Child in St. Giles', the two men [Inspector Morse and Sergeant Lewis] sat and drank their beer, and Lewis found himself reading and reading again the writing on the wooden plaque fixed to the wall behind Morse's head:
C. S. LEWIS, his brother, W. H. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, Charles Williams, and other friends met every Tuesday morning, between the years 1939-1962 in the back room of this their favourite pub. These men, popularly known as the "Inklings," met here to drink beer and to discuss, among other things, the books they were writing.
Sergeant Lewis's mind ... was waxing the more imaginative as he pictured a series of fundamental emendations to this received text, "CHIEF INSPECTOR MORSE, with his friend and colleague Sergeant Lewis, sat in this back room one Thursday, in order to solve ... "
Individuals and groups are welcome to visit the Eagle and Child. To make arrangements, please contact us.
