Which author and Oxford colleague was C.S. Lewis’s close friend in the Inklings?

J.R.R. Tolkien was C.S. Lewis’s close friend and Oxford colleague in the Inklings.

Lewis and Tolkien met at Oxford in the 1920s and became friends through shared interests in language, mythology, literature, and Christianity. Tolkien was a philologist and medievalist whose work on languages and Germanic literature complemented Lewis’s own study of English literature.

Both men belonged to the Inklings, an informal Oxford literary group that met mainly at The Eagle and Child pub and in Lewis’s rooms at Magdalen College. Members read works in progress aloud and discussed stories, poetry, and ideas. Tolkien read sections of The Lord of the Rings to the group, while Lewis shared parts of his own fiction.

Their friendship was intellectually important, although it was not free of differences. Tolkien disliked some aspects of Lewis’s Narnia books, and their religious and literary views were not identical. Even so, their mutual encouragement remains one of the best-known literary friendships of twentieth-century Oxford.