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Letters to Christopher Tolkien
C h r i s t o p h e r T o l k i e n
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On 8 January 1913, J. R. R. Tolkien and Edith Bratt got engaged. Their relationship inspired the story of Beren and Luthien, one of the great tales of Middle-earth. On the 11th of July, 1973, in a letter* to his son, Tolkien lamented that,
“…unlike the story, he couldn't beg for her life in front of Mandos.”
John Ronald Reuel Tolkien (1892 - 1973) served as the Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon and Fellow of Pembroke College, Oxford, from 1925 to 1945 and Merton Professor of English Language and Literature and Fellow of Merton College, Oxford, from 1945 to 1959.
He is best known as the author of the classic high fantasy works The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.
11 July 1972
I have at last got busy about Mummy's grave. .... The inscription I should like is:
EDITH MARY TOLKIEN
1889-1971
Lúthien
Brief and jejune, except for Lúthien, which says for me more than a multitude of words: for she was (and knew she was) my Lúthien.1
J R R TOLKIEN EDITH MARY TOLKIEN Nee - BRATT
July 13th
Say what you feel, without reservation, about this addition. I began this under the stress of great emotion & regret – and in any case I am afflicted from time to time (increasingly) with an overwhelming sense of bereavement.
I need advice. Yet I hope none of my children will feel that the use of this name is a sentimental fancy.
1 She knew the earliest form of the legend (written in hospital), and also the poem eventually printed as Aragorn's song in Lord of the Rings.
It is at any rate not comparable to the quoting of pet names in obituaries. I never called Edith Lúthien – but she was the source of the story that, in time, became the chief pan of the Silmarillion.
It was first conceived in a small woodland glade filled with hemlocks at Roos in Yorkshire (where I was for a brief time in command of an outpost of the Humber Garrison in 1917, and she was able to live with me for a while).
In those days her hair was raven, her skin clear, her eyes brighter than you have seen them, and she could sing – and dance.
But the story has gone crooked, & I am left, and I cannot plead before the inexorable Mandos.
I will say no more now. But I should like ere long to have a long talk with you. For if as seems probable I shall never write any ordered biography – it is against my nature, which expresses itself about things deepest felt in tales and myths — someone close in heart to me should know something about things that records do not record: the dreadful sufferings of our childhoods, from which we rescued one another, but could not wholly heal the wounds that later often proved disabling; the sufferings that we endured after our love began – all of which (over and above our personal weaknesses) might help to make pardonable, or understandable, the lapses and darknesses which at times marred our lives — and to explain how these never touched our depths nor dimmed our memories of our youthful love.
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.
15 July
I spent yesterday at Hemel Hempstead.
A car was sent for me & I went to the great new (grey and white) offices and bookstores of Allen & Unwin.
To this I paid a kind of official visitation, like a minor royalty, and was somewhat startled to discover the main business of all this organization of many departments (from Accountancy to Dispatch) was dealing with my works.
I was given a great welcome (& v.g. lunch) and interviewed them all from boardroom downwards.
'Accountancy' told me that the sales of The Hobbit were now rocketing up to hitherto unreached heights.
Also, a large single order for copies of The L.R. [Lord of the Rings] had just come in. When I did not show quite the gratified surprise expected, I was gently told that a single order of 100 copies used to be pleasing (and still is for other books), but this one for The L.R. was for 6,000.
T h e t a l e o f
B e r e n a n d L ú t h i e n
Was, or became, an essential element in the evolution of The
Silmarillion, the myths and legends of the First Age of the World conceived by J.R.R. Tolkien.
Returning from France and the battle of the Somme at the end
of 1916, he wrote the tale in the following year.
Essential to the story, and never changed, is the fate that shadowed the love of Beren
and Lúthien: for Beren was a
mortal man, but Lúthien was an immortal Elf.
Her father, a great Elvish lord, in deep opposition to Beren, imposed on him an impossible task that he must perform before he might wed Lúthien. This is the kernel of the legend; and it leads to the supremely heroic attempt of Beren and Lúthien together to rob the greatest of all evil beings, Melkor, called Morgoth, the Black Enemy, of a Silmaril.
In this book Christopher Tolkien has attempted to extract the story of Beren and Lúthien from the comprehensive work in which it was embedded; but that story was itself changing as it developed new associations within the larger history. To show something of the process whereby this legend of Middle-earth evolved over the years, he has told the story in his father's own words by giving, first, its original form, and then passages in prose and verse from later texts that illustrate the narrative as it changed. Presented together for the first time, they reveal aspects of the story, both in event and in narrative immediacy, that were afterwards lost.
