A deeply personal and romantic book by JRR Tolkien, written shortly after he returned from the Battle of the Somme, has been published for the first time.
Beren and Lúthien was written by the Oxford professor as he recovered from trench fever, a debilitating disease carried by the lice that infested the squalid trenches synonymous with the First World War.
Set during the First Age of Middle-earth, about 6,500 years before the events of his most famous book, The Lord of the Rings, it is the story of the ill-fated lovers, Beren and Lúthien, a mortal man and an immortal elf. Lúthien’s father, an Elvish lord, opposes the match and challenges Beren to fulfil a near-impossible task before he can marry his daughter.
As well as the horrors he saw on the Somme, the story was inspired by Tolkien’s wife Edith. On a walk in an East Yorkshire wood during his convalescence, she danced in a glade filled with white flowers. That became a pivotal scene in the story, and was the moment Beren first saw and fell in love with Lúthien. The new book, edited by Tolkien’s son Christopher, 92, keeps the story in its original form. John Garth, who wrote Tolkien and the Great War, said the author used his writing like an “exorcism” of the horrors he had witnessed.
“He’d lost two of his dearest friends on the Somme and you can imagine he must have been inside as much of a wreck as he was physically,” Garth said. The sight of his wife dancing had lifted his spirits. “Mr Tolkien felt the kind of joy he must have felt at times he would never feel again,” he said.
Advertisement
The names Beren and Lúthien are carved on the gravestone the couple share in Wolvercote cemetery in Oxford.
Other experts say the theme of the disapproving parents-in-law was also close to Tolkien’s heart as Edith’s family originally disapproved of him because he was a Catholic.