Which author did C.S. Lewis dedicate The Screwtape Letters to?

C.S. Lewis dedicated The Screwtape Letters to J.R.R. Tolkien.

The dedication appears at the beginning of Lewis’s 1942 book, a satirical series of letters from the senior demon Screwtape to his inexperienced nephew Wormwood. Screwtape advises Wormwood on how to tempt a human patient, allowing Lewis to examine moral weakness, distraction, pride, and spiritual self-deception from an inverted perspective.

Lewis and Tolkien were colleagues and friends who belonged to the literary discussion group known as the Inklings. They met at Oxford and read works in progress to one another. Tolkien’s own major fantasy work, The Lord of the Rings, later became one of the best-known books of the twentieth century.

The dedication does not mean Tolkien wrote the book or served as its model character. Lewis wrote it himself, and the book’s demonic narrator is fictional. Charles Williams and Owen Barfield were also important members of Lewis’s circle, but neither is the dedication’s addressee.