J.R.R. Tolkien was C.S. Lewis’s fellow Oxford academic and friend who wrote The Lord of the Rings.
Lewis and Tolkien met at Oxford and became close friends during the 1920s. Both were medievalists with strong interests in mythology, language, and literature. Their conversations helped shape each other’s thinking, and both participated in the Inklings, an informal Oxford literary group that met chiefly at the Eagle and Child pub.
Tolkien was a philologist and later a professor of Anglo-Saxon and English language and literature. His major fantasy works include The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. Lewis, meanwhile, wrote the Chronicles of Narnia and many works of Christian apologetics and literary criticism.
The friendship was important but not free of strain. Tolkien disliked some aspects of Lewis’s writing and was unhappy about Lewis’s public conversion to Anglican Christianity after their conversations. Even so, the two remained connected through Oxford literary life, and their names are often linked in twentieth-century fantasy history.