Beer and Beowulf
Now this is a small group that would blow my mind.
As a lover of the ancient tale, Lewis and Tolkien, the thought of such evenings happening sends my jealousy meter off the charts.
“In ‘CS Lewis’s Oxford’(book), I talk about Lewis’s late-night ‘Beer and Beowulf’ sessions which he held at Magdalen, at which students recited the poem aloud and drank beer from the barrel Lewis kept in his rooms.
“Tolkien was an occasional visitor to these meetings, offering insights into the poem’s wider contexts and competing with Lewis in blowing smoke rings.”
“Lewis placed considerable focus on the (Beowulf) poem as a tutor is apparent from his practice of inviting his students to his rooms to read and translate Anglo-Saxon in the evenings. Lewis refers to these gatherings, which began on Wednesday nights during the Michaelmas term of 1927, in a letter to his father. While the textual analysis was usually complete by 10.30pm, the students frequently stayed until midnight, engaging in conversation and enjoying the warmth of the fire.
These meetings were still in operation in November 1931, when he mentions them in a letter to his brother. By this point they had switched to Tuesday nights, and the focus is now explicitly on Beowulf.
The students continue to arrive at 8.30pm and stay long after the work is done, leaving Lewis exhausted and his room disarranged: “when they have gone and I have glanced round the empty glasses and coffee cups and the chairs in the wrong places, I am glad enough to crawl to bed.”
Michael Moynihan, who attended Lewis's ‘Beer and Beowulf’ sessions, recalled how the assembled students would chant the poem aloud while passing around a beer-jug, as well as rehearsing mnemonic devices that Lewis had invented to help them remember the complex series of sound changes.”