The surname of C.S. Lewis’s friend and fellow Inkling J.R.R. Tolkien was Tolkien. John Ronald Reuel Tolkien was an English writer and academic best known for The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.
Lewis and Tolkien met at Oxford and became close friends. Both participated in the Inklings, an informal literary discussion group that met mainly at Oxford’s Eagle and Child pub and in Lewis’s rooms at Magdalen College. Members read works in progress aloud and discussed literature, myth, and Christian themes.
The two writers influenced one another, although their careers and fictional worlds remained distinct. Lewis’s Narnia books are not part of Tolkien’s legendarium, and Tolkien did not write them. Their connection is instead biographical and literary: both were Oxford scholars, authors of major fantasy works, and members of the Inklings.