Which fictional scholar is the protagonist of C.S. Lewis’s Space Trilogy?

Elwin Ransom is the fictional scholar who serves as the protagonist of C.S. Lewis’s Space Trilogy. He is a philologist, a scholar of language, whose adventures carry him beyond Earth and into conflicts involving other worlds.

Ransom first appears in Out of the Silent Planet, published in 1938. In that novel he travels to Mars, called Malacandra, and encounters intelligent species and a moral order very different from the assumptions of the people who abduct him.

He returns in Perelandra, published in 1943, and That Hideous Strength, published in 1945. The trilogy shifts from planetary adventure to a wider exploration of language, science, power, and spiritual corruption.

The character’s name was originally “Ransom,” but Lewis later gave him the first name Elwin. Mark Studdock is a major character in That Hideous Strength, but he is not the trilogy’s recurring central figure. Ransom is also not a character from Narnia.