C.S. Lewis helped J.R.R. Tolkien develop The Lord of the Rings through friendship, criticism, and encouragement.
Tolkien and Lewis were colleagues at Oxford and members of the informal literary group known as the Inklings. They read portions of their developing works aloud to one another and exchanged detailed reactions. Lewis was an enthusiastic early audience for Tolkien’s mythology and encouraged him during the long process of writing and revising the novel.
Their friendship was intellectually important, but Lewis did not write or edit The Lord of the Rings. Tolkien alone is its author. Lewis later became famous for works including The Chronicles of Narnia and the Christian apologetic book Mere Christianity.
The two men did not agree on every literary or religious question, and their friendship changed over time. Still, Lewis’s support was especially valuable during Tolkien’s slow composition of the manuscript. The Inklings also included writers such as Charles Williams and Owen Barfield, which can make the group’s membership easy to confuse.