Both Tolkien and C.S. Lewis are literary superstars, known around the world as the creators of Middle Earth and Narnia. But few of their readers and fans know about the important and complex friendship between these two Oxford dons. Without the persistent encouragement of Lewis, Tolkien would never have completed Lord of the Rings. Likewise, all of Lewis's fiction, after the two met in 1926, bears the mark of Tolkien's influence. Both were central figures in the informal Oxford literary circle, the Inklings, and the quality of their literary friendship invites comparisons with those of William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Cowper and John Newton, and G.K. Chesterton and Hillaire Beloc.
