J.R.R. Tolkien’s academic friend who co-founded the Inklings was C.S. Lewis.
Clive Staples Lewis was an author and medievalist who taught at Oxford and later Cambridge. He and Tolkien belonged to the Inklings, an informal literary discussion group that met mainly in Oxford during the 1930s and 1940s. The group included writers and scholars interested in imaginative literature, myth, theology, and poetry.
Tolkien and Lewis became close friends after meeting at Oxford. Lewis encouraged Tolkien’s writing and was among the early readers of his work. Tolkien, in turn, influenced Lewis’s thinking about myth and Christianity. Their friendship was important to both men, although it later became more complicated.
The Inklings were not a formal society with a fixed membership list or published manifesto. Other notable participants included Charles Williams, Owen Barfield, and Hugo Dyson. The group is remembered because several members produced influential works, including Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings and Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia.