Tolkein's writer friends fought bloat in Lord of the Rings

There’s a cute story in the Times Online about J.R.R. Tolkien and his a group of his fellow writers called the Inklings.

J. R. R. Tolkien finishes with the sentence: “‘Well, I’m back,’ he said”. It is a touchingly understated conclusion which returns the prose to the homely simplicity of the inaugural chapters after the archaic epic mode of The Return of the King.

However, as Diana Pavlac Glyer tells us in her scholarly and perceptive study The Company They Keep, this is not how Tolkien originally intended to finish his trilogy. He had in mind a further epilogue, set sixteen years after the events of the rest of the book, which would have provided another, superfluous glimpse into Gamgee’s domesticity. In this ultimately excised version, a grey-haired Sam reads stories of his adventures to his children, spinning them tales of wizards and orcs and walking trees. There is even the faint suggestion that Sam has been narrating the story of The Lord of the Rings itself, before, at last, we depart the Shire for good, leaving Sam and Rose in a state of connubial bliss, tale-telling by the fireside.

What stopped Tolkien from publishing this ending was his membership of the
Inklings – that renowned circle of Oxford writers and academics who met for
seventeen years from 1932 and which counted C. S. Lewis, Charles Williams
and E. R. Edison, the author of The Worm Ouroboros, among their number. It
was they who pointed out the glutinous sentimentality of the scene,
marshalling their forces to argue that it added nothing of substance to a
narrative which had already swollen far beyond the “second Hobbit” requested
by his publishers.

Two points:

1. J.R.R. Tolkien and the Inklings would make a great name for a filk band.
2. Geez, imagine how much longer Lord of the Rings might have been without these guys.
3. Could someone please form a similar group for Peter Jackson?

Via Sullivan.