The Eagle and Child & Lamb and Flag: The Inklings' Living Room

Why is it significant?

Stand before the black-and-white timber facade of The Eagle and Child on St Giles, known affectionately to generations of locals as the Bird and Baby. Dating back to the seventeenth century, this pub is the sacred birthplace of modern twentieth-century fantasy literature.

Key Facts

Open the walk

Stand before the black-and-white timber facade of The Eagle and Child on St Giles, known affectionately to generations of locals as the Bird and Baby. Dating back to the seventeenth century, this pub is the sacred birthplace of modern twentieth-century fantasy literature.

Who met here every Tuesday morning for nearly sixteen years? Between nineteen thirty-three and nineteen forty-nine, an informal literary discussion club called the Inklings gathered around the coal fireplace in a small private back lounge called the Rabbit Room. Its central figures were C.S. Lewis, fellow of Magdalen College, and J.R.R. Tolkien, fellow of Pembroke and Merton.

Pints of bitter in hand, pipes puffing aromatic tobacco smoke, they pulled handwritten manuscripts from their coat pockets and read them aloud for fierce constructive critique. It was here that C.S. Lewis first read aloud drafts of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and The Screwtape Letters. In this very room, Tolkien read aloud the early chapters of The Lord of the Rings, testing the names of Hobbits, Elves, and the terror of the Nazgûl on his academic friends.

Directly across St Giles sits the Lamb and Flag, another historic seventeenth-century pub where the Inklings moved when the Rabbit Room became too noisy. Thomas Hardy also wrote Jude the Obscure in its snug. As the evening bells of St Giles ring out across the street, you are standing at the very hearth where Narnia and Middle-earth were first spoken into existence.