Which writer and scholar became C.S. Lewis’s close friend and fellow Oxford colleague?

J.R.R. Tolkien became C.S. Lewis’s close friend and fellow Oxford colleague.

Lewis and Tolkien met at Oxford and became members of the Inklings, an informal literary discussion group that met mainly at the Eagle and Child pub and in Oxford college rooms. They read drafts aloud, discussed mythology and language, and encouraged one another’s fiction and scholarship.

Tolkien, a philologist and medievalist, was writing The Hobbit and developing the legendarium that would become The Lord of the Rings. Lewis was working on scholarly books, Christian apologetics, and eventually the Chronicles of Narnia. Their friendship was especially important to Lewis’s return to Christianity, although Lewis’s conversion also involved other influences and a long personal process.

The relationship was not free of disagreement. Tolkien disliked some aspects of the Narnia books, particularly their mixture of different mythological traditions, while Lewis did not fully share Tolkien’s views about literary form. Even so, their friendship remains one of the best-known literary relationships of twentieth-century Oxford.