Of Beren and Luthien

"I will tell you the tale of Tinuviel," said Strider, "in brief -- for it is a long tale of which the end is not known . . . It is a fair tale, though it is sad, as are all the tales of Middle-earth, and yet it may lift up your hearts." He was silent for some time, and then he began not to speak but to chant softly.
-The Fellowship of the Ring

For many readers of Tolkien, this is the first encounter they have with the tale of Beren and Luthien - a fragment of a much larger epic, recited by Aragorn to the hobbits on the hill of Weathertop. Though Tolkien first conceived the story during the First World War and eventually wrote some 4000 odd lines of verse in octosyllabic couplets (known as the Lay of Leithian), a full account of Beren and Luthien did not see print until the prose version in The Silmarillion was published after his death. This is highly ironic, given the significance of the tale, both in how important the tale is to Tolkien's mythology and in how much of the man himself is embedded in the story.

"Among the tales of sorrow and of ruin that come down to us from the darkness of those days there are some in which amid weeping there is joy and under the shadow of death light that endures."
-The Silmarillion

Beren was of the Edain, the Three Houses of Men, who fought alongside the Nolodorin elves in their war against Morgoth, the first Enemy. Beren remained in Dorthonion after the Dagor Bragollach, until his father Barahir and fellow companions were trapped and slain by Sauron, who was at that time but a servant of Morgoth. For a while after he remained in Dorthonion as a solitary outlaw, but as the forces of Morgoth overwhelmed the land he fled the highlands, passing over the Mountains of Terror into the hidden kingdom of Doriath.

Exhausted and worn from the war, wandering in the woods of Neldoreth Beren came upon Luthien, daughter of Thingol King of Doriath, who was singing and dancing under the trees. He fell in love with her immediately and cried out to her, calling her Tinuviel - "Nightingale." Luthien in turn fell in love with Beren, caring for his injuries of body and mind, and so her doom was sealed. For while he was a mortal man, Luthien was an elven princess, immortal, and the price for loving Beren would be to forsake her immortality and join him in death beyond the Circles of the World.

When Thingol learned of his daughter's love for a mortal, he contrived a way to send Beren to his death. Promising Luthien that no harm would come to Beren, Thingol instead set as a bride-price for his daughter's hand a Silmaril - one of the jewels set in Morgoth's crown. All of the power of the elves had not sufficed to retrieve the stolen jewels, but Beren, seeing no alternative, accepted the quest.

I won't tell the rest of the story. You should read it yourselves, and learn the full tale of the Quest of the Slimaril; and of Huan, the Great Hound who accompanied Beren; and of Carcaroth and the Hunting of the Wolf.

The links between the tale of Beren and Luthien and The Lord of the Rings are obvious. The saga of Aragorn and Arwen - which Tolkien considered central to The Lord of the Rings ("That is why I regard the tale of Arwen and Aragorn as the most important of the Appendices; it is part of the essential story...") - parallels that of Beren and Luthien. Like Beren, Argorn is a man in love with an immortal. And like Beren he must meet a high bride-price - to claim the throne of Gondor as the Heir of Isildur - set by a father reluctant to see his daughter become mortal.

But for me the full resonance of this piece of Tolkien's mythology comes from the connections - indeed inspirations - drawn from the author's real life and his own romance with his wife Edith.

Tolkien was orphaned at the age of twelve. Father Francis Morgan, a Catholic priest, became his guardian. At the age of sixteen Tolkien was living in a boarding house where he met Edith Bratt, another orphan, with whom he fell in love. When Father Morgan learned of their courtship, he forbade Tolkien to see or contact her until he turned 21, fearing she would interfere with the young man's academic pursuits. Tolkien waited the required three years, before writing to her on his 21st birthday and asking for her hand in marriage. They were married before Tolkien went off to war in the trenches of the Somme. While surviving unscathed, he was invalided home with trench fever.

Tolkien saw himself as Beren, the exhausted and bereaved soldier ("By 1918, all but one of my close friends were dead.") and Edith as his Tinuviel who nursed him back to health. He began composing the story of Beren and Luthien in 1917, inspired by time he and Edith spent walking in the woods, where she sang and danced for him. Tolkien remembered those days long after, later writing to his son Christopher of Edith "In those days, her hair was raven, her skin clear, her eyes brighter than you have seen them, and she could sing- and dance." The struggles of Beren and Luthien to be together are echoes of his own long and difficult courtship of Edith.

That Edith Tolkien was the direct inspiration for Luthien, and for the tale of Beren and Luthien as a whole, is made clear in letters Tolkien wrote after her death in 1971.

"I met the Luthien Tinuviel of my own personal romance with her long dark hair, fair face and starry eyes, and beautiful voice. But now she has gone before Beren, leaving him indeed one-handed, but he has no power to move the inexorable Mandos.. "

"I have never called Edith Luthien - but she was the source of the story that in time became the chief part of The Silmarilion. It was first conceived in a woodland glade filled with hemlocks at Roos in Yorkshire..."

On her gravestone Tolkien had inscribed:

Edith Mary Tolkien
Luthien
1889-1971

He remarked of this inscription:

"brief and jejune, except for Luthien, which says for me more than a multitude of words: for she was, and knew she was, my Luthien."

"I hope none of my children will feel that the use of this name is a sentimental fancy ... but she was the source of the story that in time became the chief part of the Silmarillion... For ever (especially when alone) we still met in the woodland glade, and went hand in hand many times to escape the shadow of imminent death before our last parting..."

Tolkien died in 1973, and was buried in the same grave as Edith. His inscription reads:

John Ronald Reuel Tolkien,
Beren, 1892-1973



(A tip of the hat to Ms. Red, whose own musings on Tolkien's works got me thinking.)