J.R.R. Tolkien was the writer and fellow Oxford academic who became a close friend of C.S. Lewis and wrote The Lord of the Rings. Their friendship developed through shared interests in language, literature, mythology, and Christianity.
Lewis and Tolkien were members of the Inklings, an informal Oxford literary discussion group. The group met regularly, especially at The Eagle and Child pub, known to its members as the Bird and Baby, and also in rooms at Oxford colleges. Members read drafts aloud and discussed one another’s work.
Tolkien’s influence on Lewis was significant, particularly during Lewis’s movement back toward Christian belief. Lewis, in turn, encouraged Tolkien’s fiction and was among the early readers of parts of Tolkien’s developing mythology.
Their friendship was not without disagreements. Lewis’s public success and Tolkien’s complex publication history created different literary circumstances, and Tolkien disliked some aspects of Lewis’s later writing. Nevertheless, both men remain strongly linked with twentieth-century fantasy and Oxford literary culture.