Neither losing nor duplicating the style seems to have struck Christopher as feasible-for this, he can hardly be blamed. This is presumably because much of the story was written as the Lay of Leithian, an impressively complex poem that was still unfinished at thirteen cantos long. Between each is inserted commentary to provide what context is required to proceed with the narrative. Unlike 2007’s the Children of Húrin in which Christopher assembled his father’s piecemeal drafts into a coherent text, Beren and Lúthien has been left in its various parts. When Beren asked for her hand in marriage, Thingol charged the simple human rogue to pay for it with a Silmaril, a jewel filled with the light of heaven currently resting upon the iron crown of Morgoth, condemning him to certain death. They became one another’s irrevocably, which pleased her father, the great elf-king Thingol, none too much. He fell in love with her at first sight, and though she fled from him initially, she, too, came to love the simple adoration on his kind face. You see, Beren, fleeing the authority of that greatest Luciferian king Morgoth, came upon Lúthien dancing just the same way. In that moment, the Tale of Tinúviel, the fairy-tale first draft of Beren and Lúthien, was born. In 1917, they had their first son, and in 1918, Edith danced for then lieutenant Tolkien in a woodland glade among flowering hemlock. In this madness of blood and death, Tolkien and Edith filled each other with life. Parting from my wife then … it was like a death.” When he was struck down by trench fever and returned to England, it was only just in time to evade his entire battalion being slaughtered. As historian John Garth would later quote in his book Tolkien and the Great War, Tolkien said, “junior officers were being killed off, a dozen a minute.

To allay his wife’s fears-and no doubt his own-Tolkien devised a code so that she could track his movements on the Western Front, but death seemed no less certain. Edith lived in fear every knock would bring news of her husband’s death, and Tolkien lost all but one of his childhood friends. The young couple’s anxiety going into World War I was acute. 8, 1913, she accepted his proposal-the proposal of a man, in Tolkien’s own words, with no job, little money and no prospects except the likelihood of being killed in the Great War. However, she agreed to meet him, and by the end of Jan. On the eve of his 21st, Tolkien wrote Edith professing the persistence of his love and proposing marriage … only to find she’d become engaged to someone else. He lay no obligation on her to wait, and indeed she did not. Tolkien, an unsurprising but just authoritarian, disobeyed only once to notify Edith of this command. Francis Morgan, forbade him to see her until his 21st birthday, owing to his studies and her Anglican faith. Both orphans, both romantically imaginative, they quickly fell in love.

Edith tolkien luthien