Which author was C.S. Lewis’s close friend and fellow member of the Inklings?

J.R.R. Tolkien was C.S. Lewis’s close friend and fellow member of the Inklings.

Lewis and Tolkien met at Oxford and developed a friendship grounded in shared interests in mythology, language, literature, and Christianity. Tolkien was a professor of Anglo-Saxon and later English at Oxford, while Lewis taught English literature.

The Inklings were an informal Oxford literary discussion group that met mainly at The Eagle and Child pub, which members called the Bird and Baby, and in Lewis’s rooms at Magdalen College. Members read works in progress aloud and discussed them.

Tolkien encouraged Lewis’s developing Christian faith, while Lewis strongly supported Tolkien’s fiction during its early stages. Their friendship later became strained, especially over personal and religious differences, but their intellectual influence on twentieth-century fantasy remains closely associated.