J.R.R. Tolkien was C.S. Lewis’s close friend and fellow Oxford literary scholar.
Lewis and Tolkien met at Oxford in the 1920s and became members of the Inklings, an informal discussion group of writers and academics. The group met mainly at Oxford’s Eagle and Child pub and in Lewis’s rooms at Magdalen College.
Their friendship included conversations about mythology, language, literature, and Christianity. Tolkien, a Roman Catholic, influenced Lewis’s renewed interest in Christianity, although Lewis’s eventual conversion was his own decision and took place within Anglicanism.
Both men wrote major works of imaginative fiction: Tolkien created Middle-earth, while Lewis created Narnia. Their academic interests also overlapped, especially in medieval literature and myth. Their friendship later became strained, but their influence on twentieth-century fantasy writing remains closely linked.