Was Tolkien friends with C. S. Lewis?
Inklings
"Properly speaking," wrote Warren Lewis, "the Inklings was neither a club nor a literary society, though it partook of the nature of both. There were no rules, officers, agendas, or formal elections."[3] As was typical for university literary groups in their time and place, the Inklings were all male. Readings and discussions of the members' unfinished works were the principal purposes of meetings. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings,[4] Lewis's Out of the Silent Planet, and Williams's All Hallows' Eve were among the novels first read to the Inklings. Tolkien's fictional Notion Club (see "Sauron Defeated") was based on the Inklings. Meetings were not all serious; the Inklings amused themselves by having competitions to see who could read the notoriously bad prose of Amanda McKittrick Ros for the longest without laughing.[5]
Roy Campbell (poet)
On 5 October 1944, Campbell spent an evening with C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien at Magdalen College, Oxford. Lewis disliked "Campbell's particular blend of Catholicism and Fascism" and had attacked him in a poem titled "To the Author of "Flowering Rifle"." In the poem, Lewis had lampooned Campbell's "lack of charity" and called him a "loud fool" who had learnt the art of lying from his enemies on the left. Lewis had further declared,—Who cares
Which kind of shirt the murdering Party wears?During the evening, Lewis, feeling belligerent after consuming several glasses of port, insisted upon reading the poem aloud, while Campbell laughed off the provocation.