[Taliesan]

The rift is exaggerated . They drifted apart; most think Lewis developed other friendships which Tolkien didn’t share. Shortly before he died, Lewis nominated Tolkien for a Nobel prize in literature for LOTR.

[AnAmericanMother]

I agree the rift is greatly exaggerated. People who are friends sometimes find themselves moving in different directions over the years. I have high school friends that I still see pretty regularly but not frequently - we are still friends, but our lives have separated us a bit.

One thing I think that loomed between Tolkien & Lewis was the question of Catholicism. Tolkien was not only a Catholic but a serious one - his mother cut herself off from her family when she converted, and Catholics were still frowned on by many in England at that time. And Lewis was by birth a Belfast Church-of-Ireland man, with all that implies - he remarked, "At my first coming into the world I had been (implicitly) warned never to trust a Papist, and at my first coming into the English Faculty (explicitly) never to trust a philologist. Tolkien was both."

While they overcame those obstacles and became friends, that's not the sort of thing you can just forget about. It colors everything.