If it wasn't for C.S.Lewis, who knows if The Lord Of The Rings would have ever been completed. The deep friendship the duo shared is probably best encapsulated in a letter Tolkien sent his daughter, following Lewis' 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."
Tolkien regularly met with the Narnia author in The Eagle And Child, Oxford (which they named the Bird and Baby) where they formed a special literary club called "The Inklings". They met right through the war and read their work to each other, and Tolkien described the unpayable debt he owed to Lewis for the encouragement that his "stuff" could be more than a private hobby.
