J.R.R. Tolkien’s close fellow Inkling and the author of The Chronicles of Narnia was C.S. Lewis.
Tolkien and Lewis became friends at Oxford and were members of the Inklings, an informal literary discussion group that met mainly at The Eagle and Child pub. The group included writers and scholars who read unfinished work aloud and discussed literature, mythology, and theology.
Lewis strongly encouraged Tolkien’s fiction, while Tolkien influenced Lewis’s thinking about myth and Christianity. Their friendship was important during the development of Tolkien’s early Middle-earth writings and Lewis’s own imaginative works.
The two men eventually became less close, partly because of personal and religious differences, but their literary connection remains one of the best-known friendships in twentieth-century fantasy. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings and Lewis’s Narnia books are separate fictional universes.