Inklings
"Properly speaking," wrote Warren Lewis, "the Inklings was neither a club nor a literary society, though it partook of the nature of both. There were no rules, officers, agendas, or formal elections." As was typical for university literary groups in their time and place, the Inklings were all male. 
Readings and discussions of the members' unfinished works were the principal purposes of meetings. Tolkien's "The Lord of the Rings", Lewis's "Out of the Silent Planet", and Williams's "All Hallows' Eve" were among the novels first read to the Inklings. Tolkien's fictional Notion Club (see "Sauron Defeated") was based on the Inklings. Meetings were not all serious; the Inklings amused themselves by having competitions to see who could read the notoriously bad prose of Amanda McKittrick Ros for the longest without laughing.
The House of the Wolfings
"The House of the Wolfings" was one of the influences on J. R. R. Tolkien's popular "The Lord of the Rings". In a December 31, 1960 letter published in "The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien", (p. 303), Tolkien wrote: 'The Dead Marshes and the approaches to the Morannon owe something to Northern France after the Battle of the Somme. They owe more to William Morris and his Huns and Romans, as in "The House of the Wolfings" or "The Roots of the Mountains"." Among the numerous parallels with "The Lord of the Rings", Morris has Old English-style placenames such as Mirkwood (p. 2) and the Mark (title page), Germanic personal names such as Thiodolf (p. 8), and dwarves as skilled smiths ("How the Dwarf-wrought Hauberk was Brought away from the Hall of the Daylings", p. 97).