In fact, J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis became friends long before either man had become famous! Their initial meeting in 1931 would prove to have a direct influence on both their literary careers and the rest of their lives. The two men went out with a third companion for a late-night stroll around Oxford’s campus which developed into an argument about religion that nearly lasted until morning. In addition to teaching at Oxford, the pair had several shared interests, including Anglo-Saxon verse, Icelandic sagas, and a general love of the culture of “the North.”
Their friendship really took off a year later when Tolkien invited Lewis to join a literary group known as “the Coalbiters.” The group got together every week to read Icelandic epics in the original Old Norse language. These meetings inevitably led to a perusal of Tolkien’s pet writing projects by Lewis, and vice versa. The timing could not have been much better, as both men were experiencing sweeping self-doubts about their respective writing abilities at the time, and may have otherwise kept their writing a private hobby. Tolkien having a hand in Lewis’s return to Christianity bore its fruit in the Narnia series, and in return, Lewis prodded Tolkien relentlessly until he completed The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.
It could easily be said that neither author would have earned the reputation they have today if not for their shared friendship. But did you know that J.R.R. Tolkien even based one of his characters on C.S. Lewis? Treebeard, the leader of the walking trees known as “Ents,” shares many of Lewis’s mannerisms, such as a booming voice and a constant throat-clearing habit. The deep camaraderie the duo shared is probably best summarized in a letter from Tolkien to his daughter following Lewis’s death in 1963: "So far I have felt the normal feelings of a man my age -- like an old tree that is losing all its leaves one by one: this feels like an axe-blow near the roots."
