Who was C.S. Lewis's close friend and fellow Inkling who wrote The Hobbit?

C.S. Lewis's close friend and fellow Inkling who wrote The Hobbit was J.R.R. Tolkien. The two authors met at Oxford and became important readers and critics of each other's work.

The Inklings were an informal Oxford literary discussion group that met mainly at The Eagle and Child pub and in college rooms. Tolkien's developing stories about Middle-earth and Lewis's imaginative writing were shaped in part by this culture of reading drafts aloud and receiving frank criticism.

Lewis supported Tolkien's fiction and helped encourage him during periods when publication was uncertain. Their friendship later became more complicated, especially as their religious and personal lives diverged, but their Oxford association remains one of the best-known literary friendships of the twentieth century. Charles Williams and Owen Barfield were also Inklings, but neither wrote The Hobbit.