Who was C.S. Lewis’s close friend and fellow fantasy author who wrote The Hobbit?

C.S. Lewis’s close friend and fellow fantasy author who wrote The Hobbit was J.R.R. Tolkien.

J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis were colleagues at Oxford and members of the Inklings, a literary group that met regularly to read and discuss works in progress. Tolkien, an English philologist, wrote The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, while Lewis created The Chronicles of Narnia and several other fictional works.

Their friendship was especially important to Lewis’s return to Christianity. Lewis later described Tolkien and Hugo Dyson as influential in conversations that helped him move from atheism toward belief in Christianity. Tolkien and Lewis also exchanged criticism on their writing, although their friendship became more complicated over time.

A common mistake is to identify Tolkien as the author of Narnia because both writers produced major twentieth-century fantasy series and worked at Oxford. Tolkien’s Middle-earth and Lewis’s Narnia are separate fictional universes, with different characters, settings, and mythologies.