Elwin Ransom narrates C.S. Lewis’s Out of the Silent Planet.
Ransom is a Cambridge philologist who is abducted during a walking trip and taken to Malacandra. His knowledge of languages becomes central to the story because communication with the planet’s inhabitants shapes his understanding of their societies and beliefs.
Ransom remains the central protagonist of Lewis’s Space Trilogy. He returns in Perelandra and That Hideous Strength, although the later novels expand the cast and shift their settings. Readers sometimes confuse him with Mark Studdock, the principal viewpoint character in That Hideous Strength, or with Orual, the narrator of Till We Have Faces. Those characters belong to different Lewis novels.