The Fellowship Trivia Quiz

Answer: The Inklings Oxford

The Inklings were an informal group of scholars and writers that met together regularly in the 1920s, 30s, & 40s. C.S. Lewis was the central figure, his friends and college associates from Oxford University making up most of the group. His brother Warren Lewis was a member and it is from his documenting of meetings that we get a lot of knowledge of what went on. Warren said "We were no mutual admiration society: praise for good work was unstinted, but censure for bad work - or even not-so-good work - was often brutally frank."

C.S. Lewis published "The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe" in 1950, and the rest of his "Chronicles of Narnia" series in the decade that followed. After this the group drifted away as they took various employments and moved around. Each of them credited the others for the friendship, critique, and support, that spurred their endeavours and resulted in their greatest works.

Answer: The Inklings Oxford

The group had been already meeting up for a few years before the name "Inklings" was chosen in homage to a college library society that had recently closed. J.R.R. Tolkien once quipped that it was also a pun to describe themselves, meaning those with half-formed ideas who dabbled in ink.

Tolkien had founded a similar secret group at school, of fellow aspiring writers, which they called the "Tea Club & Barrovian Society." It continued without him after he left school but devastatingly only Tolkien and one other original member survived the First World War. Some of them had great nicknames such as Thomas "Tea Cake" Barnsley and Wilfrid "Whiffy" Payton.

The first edition of Tolkien's "The Lord of the Rings" had a dedication to the Inklings. Tolkien and Lewis became close friends and Tolkien would later say he could never have finished his "Lord of the Rings" series without Lewis.

Tolkien was an author, poet, philologist, and academic. One of his early jobs was working on the Oxford English Dictionary. He was professor in both Leeds and Oxford Universities. After his death, and in his honour, the prestigious position of "J. R. R. Tolkien Professorship of English Literature and Language" was established at Oxford University.

Answer: The Inklings Oxford

At its height, the group met twice weekly. Tuesday mornings they met in the "Eagle and Child" pub for beer and intelligent conversation. Thursday evenings they met in C.S. Lewis's college rooms where they would read aloud their various poems or books they were working on, and applaud or critique or both.

But Christopher Tolkien, J.R.R.'s youngest son, was also doing the same at home, "...my Christopher was my real primary audience who has read, vetted, and typed all of the new Hobbit..." wrote Tolkien, "...he occupied the multiple positions of audience, critic, son, student...". So it was that upon his coming of age (21) Christopher was made their youngest member and thereafter took the role of reading the works aloud to the group. After J.R.R. died, it was Christopher who completed, edited, and published the rest of Tolkien's work, for which he received the Bodley Medal.

Answer: The Inklings Oxford

Barfield is sometimes described as "the first and last Inkling" because he was there at the very start and outlived the others, and also because of his influence on the group. He became friends with Lewis at university and through much discussion of philosophy and theology they had profound influences on each other. Lewis dedicated his first novel, "The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe" to Barfield's daughter, Lucy.

Barfield's expertise on philosophy and language also heavily influenced Tolkien's work. Barfield believed that language evolved from imagination and therefore a poet's words were literally inventing new ideas. Tolkien was a philologist and had been inventing his own languages since he was a child. The two would regularly meet together all through their lives for long walks and deep discussions. Many of the group, such as Charles Williams or Hugo Dyson, and Barfield, became great scholars and wrote academic works. Barfield has a special place in the Inklings though as one of the original three.

Answer: Algonquin Round Table New York

The Algonquin Round Table had begun with a single lunch amongst friends at the Algonquin Hotel. The lunch was reportedly so much fun they decided to do it every day. A decade later they were still doing it and so it is sometimes nicknamed "The 10 year lunch". Kaufman was a double Pulitzer Prize winner, theatre director, playwright, movie script writer, and drama critic for The New York Times. He wrote 45 dramas, comedies, and musicals, sometimes with fellow Algonquin member Edna Ferber who had written the novel "Showboat" which then became the musical. He later won a Tony Award for Best Director for the original production of "Guys and Dolls".

Kaufman was also a humourist and produced several Marx Brothers movies, in fact he wrote the script for "A Night at the Opera". At one point he was the most famous name on Broadway, and considered the funniest playwright. Dick Cavett has described Kaufman as Groucho's God. In person, Kaufman was known for his caustic wit and satire and appeared on TV panel shows. When Kaufman was once fired for taking his wit too far, comedian Fred Allen remarked "There were only two wits on television: Groucho Marx and George S. Kaufman. Without Kaufman, television has reverted to being half-witted".

Answer: Algonquin Round Table New York

Unlike so many groupings of this type, the Algonquin Round Table included women as well as men. Ruth Hale was a columnist in the "New York Times" and "Vanity Fair". She and her husband, widely read journalist Heywood Broun, were round table members, political radicals, and activists. (She was once arrested along with Dorothy Parker for protesting the state execution of Sacco and Vanzetti).

She was a feminist. She not only refused to take Broun's name after marriage but founded the Lucy Stone League to fight for the right of married women to keep their maiden names in legal transactions, such as on a passport or the deeds of a house. Her fellow member, Jane Grant, was one of the first to join and after Hale's death in 1934 it was Grant who restarted the league to continue fighting for feminist causes throughout the fifties and sixties and beyond. Alongwith her husband, Harold Ross, Grant founded "The New Yorker" magazine in 1925. "The New Yorker" could be considered the legacy of this group. It hired several of the table to write for it, they already being the most notable columnists of the day or about to become such thanks to "The New Yorker".

Answer: Algonquin Round Table New York

Dorothy Parker is perhaps the person most associated with the Algonquin Round Table group. She was the founder of it, along with her good friends Robert Benchly and Robert Sherwood, her fellow writers from "Vanity Fair". The round table was sometimes nicknamed the Vicious Circle not least because Parker's wit could be searingly close to the bone, and she wasn't the only one with that trait.

Parker wrote for "Vanity Fair" from 1917 to 1920. Then from 1927 to 1931 she was was the main book critic at "The New Yorker", writing under the alias "Constant Reader" as whom she often dispensed her cruellest but funniest wit. It quickly became the first page "The New Yorker" readers turned to. Her light verse, which was what first made her famous, was regularly published in these magazines, among others. For example, this one about Oscar Wilde:

"If with the literate I am
Impelled to try an epigram,
I never seek to take the credit;
We all assume that Oscar said it."

Most of her short stories appeared first in "The New Yorker". Between 1926 and 1933 she published three collections of verse and two collections of stories, all best sellers, as well as editing for various magazines. In 1929, she won the O. Henry Prize for her story "Big Blonde". By the 1930s, she was a celebrity in her own right with plays already being written about her. She helped found the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League, and this was typical of her allegiance with social activism. When she died she left all her literary estate to Martin Luther King, Jr. Within a year of her death, he was assassinated and the estate passed to the NCAAP who created a memorial garden for her.

Answer: Algonquin Round Table New York

The Algonquin Hotel was designated a National Literary Landmark in 1996 based on the contribution of its literary clientele. The Round Table consisted of critics, writers, journalists, columnists, and the most notable wits of their time in New York City. By 1925, people came to eat lunch at the hotel just to view the group in action. "Mank", as they called Herman Jacob Mankiewicz, was considered by the table as one of the wittiest men.

After the First World War he worked in Paris and Germany as a newspaper correspondent before moving to New York in 1922 where George S. Kaufman brought him into the round table circle. As well as writing plays, he was the first regular theatre critic at "The New Yorker" magazine. After this he headed to Hollywood to write movies, where talking movies were just taking off and several of the group found their fortunes scriptwriting. Eventually he co wrote "Citizen Kane" with Orson Welles, for which they both received an Oscar.

Answer: Algonquin Round Table New York

The Round Table gatherings ran daily from 1919 to 1930, and thereafter intermittently. Tallulah Bankhead, then a stage actress, came from a prominent political Alabama family (her father was Speaker of the House of Representatives from 1936 to 1940). She moved into the Algonquin Hotel to live in 1918 and her quick wit and charm was such that she easily found her way into the lunches. Her stage acting career took her to Britain for several years where she was considered a living legend, but she also worked in Hollywood and later in TV and radio where she performed several monologues written by Dorothy Parker.

Like Parker she was a proponent of civil rights. She was the first white woman to be featured on the cover of "Ebony" magazine, and was one of the few actresses to feature on the covers of both "Time" and "Life" magazines. She was one of the original inductees of the American Theater Hall of Fame. In 1944, Hitchcock cast her as tough talking journalist Constance Porter in her most successful film, "Lifeboat". Her superb performance won her the New York Film Critics Circle award. She accepted with the words "Dahlings, I was wonderful!"

Answer: Algonquin Round Table New York

The first Algonquin lunch was held as a comedy roast for Alexander Woollcott, the famous drama critic and larger than life radio personality. He was the king pin of the group and when he went to critique a Marx Brothers show on Broadway he was instantly enchanted with the mute harp player clown that was Harpo Marx and invited him into the circle.

Harpo enjoyed not just the lunches but the regular Saturday night poker games the circle would hold. Harpo was not mute in real life and had plenty enough wit to hold his own in the group. When Woollcott decided to buy an island in the 1920s for treasured members to holiday on, Harpo was invited. Neshobe Island is described in Harpo's autobiography as a fun filled sanctuary. There the group played croquet, cards, or murder mystery games, or read plays by the fireside, and dined and sunbathed in privacy and uproarious fashion. This went on even after the lunches stopped, in fact until Woollcott's death in 1943. Harpo launched his autobiography in 1961 at the Algonquin Hotel. It was called "Harpo Speaks".

Answer: Bloomsbury Group London

In 1904, Virginia Stephen, her sister Vanessa, and her brother Thoby, moved to Bloomsbury in London, and it was there they began to mingle with each others friends from college. Thoby held Friday Club for aspiring writers and poets, and Vanessa held Thursday Club for fellow artists to meet. Through these clubs many relationships were formed including the sisters' marriages: Vanessa became Mrs Clive Bell and Virginia became Mrs Leonard Woolf. She is best known for her novels such "Mrs Dalloway"(1925) and "Orlando" (1928) but she was also a celebrated essayist, writing essays on literary history, women's writing, and the politics of power. She began writing for the the prestigious Times Literary Supplement in 1905 and by 1918 was writing weekly reviews and columns.

She was one of the leaders of the Modernist movement in literature, along with names such as James Joyce and William Faulkner, pioneering interior monologues and stream-of-consciousness, as in her books "To the Lighthouse" (1927) and "The Waves" (1931) considered to be her masterpieces. Her sister Vanessa Bell became an influential painter and as well as exhibiting in London and Paris she designed the book jackets for all Virginia's books which were then printed by Leonard Woolf in his publishing house Hogarth Press.

Answer: Bloomsbury Group London

The Bloomsbury Group were modernist in philosophy, and revolutionary for their time. They believed in pacifism and were politically liberal. The group did not have a strict membership, rather they were a friendship group with similar values, and many modern thinkers were at one point briefly associated with it such as Bertrand Russell and Aldous Huxley. By the 1930s the group had begun to drift apart.

John Maynard Keynes was a famous economist, author, and journalist, and is best known for his economic theories, (Keynesian economics). Keynes took roles advising governments in the post-war rehabilitation of the economy (both world wars) as well as lecturing at Cambridge University. For Keynes, economics was about ethical decision making. He was profoundly liberal, believing that prosperity would best offer people the most freedom. He has been called the "father of microeconomics". As with Adam Smith, the "father of macroeconomics", his influence on economics is still prevalent today right across the world. It has been argued that they may be the most influential economists that ever lived.

Answer: Bloomsbury Group London

Edward Morgan Forster is best known for his novels such as "A Room with a View" (1908), "Howards End" (1910), and "A Passage to India" (1924). He later became a Professor at Cambridge University. At college, Forster joined a secret group called "the Apostles" (aka the Cambridge Conversazione Society); previous members had included authors and poets such as Alfred Lord Tennyson. They met to discuss philosophical and moral questions. Many of them went on to become the Bloomsbury Group in the 1910s and 1920s

Most of the men in the Bloomsbury Group had studied or taught at Cambridge but women were not allowed to get degrees from Cambridge in the early part of the 20th century, although they were allowed to study there, and most studied at Kings College, so it was Virginia Woolf's brother who first connected the men to women, and the group had a ebb and flow of people who lived and holidayed together. The Schlegel sisters in "Howards End" are allegedly based on Virginia Woolf and her sister Vanessa Bell.

The Bloomsbury Group were united by their modernist values and aesthetics, and their liberal attitudes to everything including relationships. Forster was homosexual in a time that banned such a thing, and several of the the group were either gay or bisexual, so with them he could relax and be himself. He wrote a novel about a homosexual relationship - "Maurice", written in 1913 - but due to his concerns about public attitudes and legal consequences, it was not published until 1971, just after his death.

His forbears included church reformers and slavery abolitionists. Forster himself became a Humanist and fought for individual liberty and against censorship. He was a conscientious objector in the First World War, working with the British Red Cross in Egypt. In 1960, he appeared as a witness for the defence in the trial against D.H. Lawrence's "Lady Chatterley's Lover".

Answer: Bloomsbury Group London

Lytton Strachey was an historian, literary critic, and founding member of the Bloomsbury group. He wrote serious works about serious subjects but with psychological analysis and wit that trailblazed the modern English literary style. He was known for his ironic prose. As a freshman in Cambridge he met Clive Bell and Leonard Woolf and they formed the Midnight Society which Bell later called the source of the Bloomsbury Group. Strachey also belonged to the "Apostles" with E.M. Forster.

He was briefly engaged to Virginia Woolf, and later lived out his life with an associate of the Bloomsbury group, the artist Dora Carrington, but he was in fact gay and so these were unsuccessful romances, although Dora loved him as deeply as a partner until his death. From 1904 to 1914, he wrote for "The Spectator" magazine. He wrote book, drama, and theatre reviews, often under the pseudonym "Ignotus". In the First World War, he tried to declare himself a conscientious objector, but before he could argue his case, and as he had suffered from various illnesses all his life, he was granted an exemption on health grounds. He died aged 50 in 1932.

Answer: The Four Irish Nobel Laureates

William Butler Yeats was a poet, prose writer, and dramatist, but best known for his poetry such as "Easter 1916" and "The Lake Isle of Inisfree" and his obsession with his muse Maud Gonne. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1923, the first Irish person to do so, "...for his always inspired poetry, which in a highly artistic form gives expression to the spirit of a whole nation" (NobelPrize.org). He later co-founded Ireland's National Theatre (The Abbey). In earlier years, 1890, he had co-founded an informal poetry writing group called "The Rhymers' Club" which met in the London Fleet Street pub beautifully named "Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese". In 1913 he employed Ezra Pound as secretary and Pound lived with him as such for three winters.

Nobel prizes are awarded for "the greatest benefit to humankind". There were four Irish winners of the Nobel Prize for Literature in the 20th Century, hence they became known as "The Four Irish Laureates". Yeats influenced the other three immensely, and his work is sometimes deemed the "precursor to Modernism".

Answer: The Four Irish Nobel Laureates

The prize was awarded to Shaw in 1925 "for his work which is marked by both idealism and humanity, its stimulating satire often being infused with a singular poetic beauty". (Nobelprize.org)

The first English-speaking recipient of the prize was Rudyard Kipling in 1907; Kipling is also the youngest recipient in the 20th century at aged 42. The first Chinese person to win it was not until the year 2000; Gao Xingjian's works were banned in China for mentioning the Tiananmen Square massacre.

Bernard Shaw was an essayist and playwright. He is most famous for his play "Pygmalion" which he helped adapt to the musical "My Fair Lady" which won him an Oscar, the first and only Nobel Prize Winner to do so in the 20th century.

He became great friends with Virginia Woolf after she moved into his old house in London. They exchanged letters regularly. They were both members of the Fabian Society, a socialist group who sought to reform social policies. "The New Statesman" magazine was a direct product of the society, aiming to advance progress in an unbiased way, no allegiance to party or creed, and Shaw generously helped to fund its start up.

Language was his huge love. In his will he left a prize for a competition to design a brand new alphabet. The winning alphabet looks quite like shorthand and is called the Shaw alphabet or "Shavian".

Answer: The Four Irish Nobel Laureates

Samuel Beckett received The Nobel Prize in Literature in 1969 "for his writing, which - in new forms for the novel and drama - in the destitution of modern man acquires its elevation". (NobelPrize.org)

Most famous for his plays such as "Waiting for Godot", he also wrote novels and short stories, essays, and art criticism, all in both English and French. He formed a deep friendship with James Joyce who, as Seamus Heaney describes it, fostered Beckett. Beckett in turn provided a sounding board for Joyce's experiments in language, as well as committing to transcribe Joyce's work for him.

He was born in Dublin on Friday the 13th (April 1906). He left for Paris when he was 20 and thereafter split his life between the two places. In the 30s he was a university lecturer in Dublin. In World War II he joined the French resistance. He studied modern languages and loved the modernism of Europe. He died in Paris in 1989.

The landmark "Samuel Beckett bridge" was opened and named after Beckett in 2007. It crosses the Liffey just a few bridges downstream of the the "James Joyce Bridge" in Dublin City Centre. Seamus Heaney, at the time the last of living member of the four laureates, attended the opening in a personal friendship capacity.

Answer: The Four Irish Nobel Laureates

In 1995 the prize was awarded to Seamus Heaney "for works of lyrical beauty and ethical depth, which exalt everyday miracles and the living past". (NobelPrize.org)

The very first Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded in 1901 to Mr Sully Prudhomme, a French poet. In 1964 it was awarded to Jean-Paul Sartre who refused it, saying that "a writer should not allow himself to be turned into an institution".

Heaney was a poet, essayist, and translator of Sophocles and of Beowolf (which incidentally Tolkien also translated). He has held posts as visiting professor in rhetoric at Harvard, and Professor of Poetry at Oxford. He was was raised in County Derry, lived all over the world, but most latterly for many years in Dublin. He was the author of over 20 volumes of poetry and criticism. His last words to his widow Marie were in a text from hospital, minutes before he died, saying "noli timere": do not be afraid.