Which writer helped C.S. Lewis return to Christianity during their Oxford friendship?

J.R.R. Tolkien helped C.S. Lewis return to Christianity during their Oxford friendship.

Lewis and Tolkien met at Oxford and became close colleagues and friends. Both were members of the Inklings, an informal literary discussion group that met mainly at The Eagle and Child pub and in rooms at Oxford. Their conversations covered mythology, language, literature, and Christianity, and each read developing work to the other.

Lewis had moved away from the Christianity of his childhood and described himself for a time as an atheist. He returned to belief in God in 1930 and became a Christian in 1931. Discussions with Tolkien and Hugo Dyson were especially important to the change in how Lewis understood myth and the Christian story. Lewis later wrote that a conversation with Tolkien and Dyson helped him see Christianity as the “true myth.”

Tolkien did not single-handedly convert Lewis, and their friendship was not free of disagreements. They differed over literary taste, academic priorities, and Lewis’s growing fame. Still, Tolkien was one of the most important intellectual influences on Lewis’s religious development.