[Tolkien, author of The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings, was one of the "Inklings," a group of friends who met weekly in Lewis's rooms to discuss literature and to read works-in-progress to each other. During the few years of its existence, the group included Lewis, Tolkien, Charles Williams, Owen Barfield, W. H. Lewis, and several other noteworthy regulars. Tolkien, a man of strict and very conservative literary standards, frequently disliked Lewis's imaginative works. But in the following letter to his publisher, Stanley Unwin, Tolkien defended his friend's novel Out of the Silent Planet. On 2 March 1938, Unwin had sent Tolkien an excerpt from a reader's report, which had disparaged as "bunk" the inhabitants of Lewis's planet Malacandra. Unwin asked Tolkien for his thoughts on Lewis's book.]

Lewis is a great friend of mine, and we are in close sympathy (witness his two reviews of my Hobbit): this may...