The J. R. R. Tolkien Companion and Guide: Volume 2: Reader’s Guide PART 1

BACKGROUND TO THE STORY

The story of Beren and Lúthien was inspired by an incident in Tolkien’s life which occurred in late May or early June 1917, when *Edith Tolkien danced for her husband in a woodland glade. He described the event in a letter to his son Christopher in 1972:

I never called Edith Lúthien – but she was the source of the story that in time became the chief part 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. [11 July 1972, Letters, p. 420]

What this meant to Tolkien is shown by the inscription on the stone in Wolvercote Cemetery, *Oxford, marking the burial place of Ronald and Edith Tolkien: Edith Mary Tolkien, Lúthien, 1889–1971. John Ronald Reuel Tolkien, Beren, 1892–1973.

Tolkien commented on the story in a letter to *Milton Waldman in ?late 1951:

Here we meet, among other things, the first example of the motive … that the great policies of world history, ‘the wheels of the world’, are often turned not by the Lords and Governors, even gods, but by the seemingly unknown and weak – owing to the secret life in creation, and the part unknowable to all wisdom but One, that resides in the intrusions of the Children of God into the Drama. It is Beren the outlawed mortal who succeeds (with the help of Lúthien, a mere maiden, even if an elf of royalty) where all the armies and warriors have failed: he penetrates the stronghold of the Enemy and wrests one of the Silmarilli from the Iron Crown. Thus he wins the hand of Lúthien and the first marriage of mortal and immortal is achieved. [Letters, p. 149]

CRITICISM

Christina Scull has noted that the significance of the story became greater in later versions as the importance of the Silmarils grew in the legendarium, and the one recovered by Beren and Lúthien enabled Eärendel to reach Valinor and obtain help against Morgoth. She also has found that the love of Beren and Lúthien for each other ‘becomes deeper in successive retellings, and seems at last foreordained in the Music of the Ainur’ (‘The Development of Tolkien’s Legendarium: Some Threads in the Tapestry of Middle-earth’, in Tolkien’s Legendarium: Essays on The History of Middle-earth, ed. Verlyn Flieger and Carl F. Hostetter (2000), p. 16).

T.A. Shippey in The Road to Middle-earth counts at least eight extant versions of the tale of Beren and Lúthien, varying in length, completeness, intrinsic merit, literary merit, and ‘importance for understanding the development of the whole story. Yet the existence of all the versions together does more than merely provide one with more “ox-bones” for study. It also radically alters the flavour of the soup, creating something of the “flavour of deep-rootedness” which Tolkien so often detected and admired’ (2nd edn. 1992, pp. 277–8; ‘ox-bones’ and ‘soup’ are references to *On Fairy-Stories). Shippey also discusses at length some small but significant details in the story, among them Beren’s oath to Thingol:

If one had only the Silmarillion version of this scene, its logic and development would seem perfectly clear. One irreducible fact about Beren is that he becomes … ‘the One-Handed’. … Since this is an irreducible fact, surely it must all along have been part of the story that Beren, in the scene with Thingol, should find himself swearing an unknowingly ironic oath: in the words of the Silmarillion version, ‘when we meet again my hand shall hold a Silmaril’ – because of course when he and Thingol meet again his hand will be holding a Silmaril, but both will be in the belly of the wolf. With that established it would seem to be only plain sense for Thingol to have provoked the oath by setting up a hand for hand, jewel for jewel exchange, as again he so clearly does in the Silmarillion: bring me a jewel (the Silmaril) in your hand, and I will put in your hand a compensating jewel (Lúthien’s hand). …

Yet a glance at the [Book of Lost Tales, Part Two] version shows that in the beginning these connections were simply not there. Beren does say, in his second meeting with Thingol (there Tinwelint), ‘I have a Silmaril in my hand even now’ … but in the first meeting does not make the corresponding promise. His exact words are only ‘I … will fulfil thy small desire’: which, of course, at the time of their second meeting he has still not done. [p. 278]

Katharyn W. Crabbe in J.R.R. Tolkien (rev. and expanded edn. 1988) compares Beren as a hero to Túrin; like Túrin, he suffers loss and loneliness, but is motivated not by vengeance but by love. He is brave, and ‘although his pride may lead him to attempt the seemingly impossible, it does not lead him to mindless violence. It is a productive rather than a destructive pride … unlike Túrin, whose pride leads him time after time to bad decisions and self-destructive behavior’ (p. 194).

Verlyn Flieger devotes two chapters in Splintered Light: Logos and Language in Tolkien’s World (2nd edn. 2002) to the story. She poses the questions: ‘Can the *free will of Men alter the fate of Elves? Does the fate of the Elf entangle the Man who intersects it?’ and finds that ‘both fate and free will appear to be involved … in the lives of Beren, Lúthien, and Thingol’ (p. 131). She examines their actions in this context, and in relation to the main theme of her book, that The Silmarillion is ‘a story about light. Images of light in all stages – bright, dim, whole, refracted, clear or rainbow-hued – pervade the songs and stories of the fictive. It is a world peopled with sub-creators whose interactions with and attitudes toward the light shape their world and their own destinies within it’ (p. 49).

Iwan Rhys Morus in ‘The Tale of Beren and Lúthien’, Mallorn 20 (September 1983), comments that this story is

in many ways a turning-point in the mythology for in it many of the various strands of other narratives are brought together and combined to bring about the doom of the Eldar. Indeed I would argue that one of Tolkien’s master-strokes in this tale is the irony of the fact that the Free People’s greatest achievement against Morgoth – the taking of a Silmaril from the Iron Crown – is the seed that brings about their eventual utter downfall. [p. 19]

He discusses the influence of the episode at Roos on the story, and notes that this is not Tolkien’s only use of the motif of the ‘encounter in the woods’, citing among others Aragorn and Arwen, Thingol and Melian, Eöl and Aredhel, and Aldarion and Erendis. He suggests possible sources for elements of the story, in particular in the *Kalevala ‘the journey of Väinämöinen and Lemminkäinen to steal the Sampo, in which Väinämöinen’s singing casts the whole of Pohja into deep slumber’, and several wizards’ singing-contests.

Around this central core Tolkien has piled a plethora of mythic themes and motifs. The striking image of a hand in a wolf’s mouth is straight from the Prose Edda: Fenris and the god Tyr. Lúthien with her escape via a rope of her own hair from prison is of course Rapunzel from Grimms’ Fairy Tales. The hunting of Carcharoth recalls the great quest for the Twrch Trwyth in ‘Culwch ac Olwen’ whilst the great hound Huan reminds me strongly of the most faithful of wolfhounds: Gelert in the old Welsh legend. [p. 22]

Richard C. West in ‘Real-world Myth in a Secondary World’, Tolkien the Medievalist, ed. Jane Chance (2003), also comments on resonances from various sources which a reader might recognize and suppose to have influenced elements of the story. But he quite rightly points out that similarities do not necessarily mean influence, and that the differences are often far more marked than the similarities. As one example he cites ‘Rapunzel’, one of the Märchen collected by the Brothers Grimm, remarking that ‘Lúthien lets her hair down not just to allow her lover to reach her but to enable her to reach him’ (p. 263). Myth, legend, and fairy-tale ‘were an integral part of [Tolkien’s] mental furniture and imaginative make-up’, and what we read ‘over and over are echoes, even when we cannot pinpoint an exact source’ (p. 264). West cites several works which may have provided ‘echoes’ for the story of Beren and Lúthien: Robin Hood and his outlaw band for Barahir; Tristan and Iseult living in the woods; the killing one by one of Finrod and Beren’s companions ‘is strongly reminiscent of the sons of King Völsung being killed one each night until only Sigmund survives’; Sauron’s shape-shifting recalls the Norse god Loki and the Greek Nereus; Carcharoth biting off Beren’s hand recalls Fenris Wolf and Tyr; Huan plays the same role as the magical helper in many fairy-tales; Lúthien in her pleading before Mandos ‘reenacts the descent into the underworld of Orpheus in Greek mythology or of Ishtar in Babylonian to recover a loved one, but with a happier result: much as in the Middle English *Sir Orfeo …’ (p. 265).

In another essay, ‘“And She Named Her Own Name”: Being True to One’s Word in Tolkien’s Middle-earth’, Tolkien Studies 2 (2005), Richard C. West points out that whereas in early versions of the story both Lúthien and Beren occasionally lie, and this is justified by the narrator, in the latest version Lúthien’s speaks only truth. He connects this with a common theme in Tolkien’s fiction, ‘that it is dangerous to use the weapons employed by evil even with good intentions’ (p. 4).

Randel Helms briefly discusses the development of the Beren and Lúthien story in his Tolkien and the Silmarils (1981), arguing that ‘its chief written source’ is the tale of ‘Culwch and Olwen’ in The Mabinogion (p. 15). Granted, as Carl Phelpstead does in Tolkien and Wales: Language, Literature and Identity (2011), that ‘Tolkien’s use of Culhwch and Olwen seems incontrovertible’ (p. 73), Helms’s assertion is perhaps too bold, considering the number of other possible sources, not to mention original invention by Tolkien.

Beren and Lúthien. Edition of texts relating the story of Beren and Lúthien from *‘The Silmarillion’, edited by *Christopher Tolkien. First published in Great Britain by HarperCollins, London, and in the United States by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Boston, in June 2017.

The core of this book is not a single or composite telling of the story of Beren and Lúthien, but a collection of texts or extracts arranged to show its evolution over a long period. Christopher Tolkien provides a biographical and literary introduction (‘Notes on the Elder Days’), as well as a framework, in which he introduces each text and briefly gives relevant information about its source and how it fits into the wider mythology. (In the Reader’s Guide the development of the story of Beren and Lúthien is discussed mainly in the preceding article, *‘Of Beren and Lúthien’, and partly in *‘Of the Ruin of Doriath’ and *‘The Voyage of Eärendil and the War of Wrath’. Each of these begins with a summary of the chapter in *The Silmarillion, then the story as told in *The Book of Lost Tales, followed by an account, text by text, of what was changed or added over the years. Each of the component texts also has its own entry in the present book.)

SUMMARY OF THE CONTENTS

Two extracts from the *Quenta Noldorinwa (1930) (*The Shaping of Middle-earth, pp. 88, 85) describe the making of the Silmarils and the meeting of Lúthien’s parents, Melian the fay and Thingol, one of the leaders of the Elves. An extract from *The Book of Lost Tales, Part Two (pp. 9, 10) then tells how Gwendeling and Tinwelint (Melian and Thingol) established a guarded realm; and this is followed by the complete ‘Tale of Tinúviel’ from The Book of Lost Tales, Part Two (pp. 10–41).

A synopsis of the story as it appeared in the *Sketch of the Mythology (c. 1926; The Shaping of Middle-earth, pp. 24–5) illustrates that Thû the hunter had now replaced Tevildo, and Beren was now a man, son of Barahir, a chieftain of Men. Next, an extract from the *Lay of Leithian (Canto II, lines 151–400; *The Lays of Beleriand, pp. 162–8) tells how Beren and Barahir’s refuge was betrayed to Morgoth by Gorlim, one of their companions, and how Beren, absent at the time of the attack, recovered a ring taken from his dead father’s hand.

From the Quenta Noldorinwa, one extract (The Shaping of Middle-earth, pp. 104–6) explains the importance of the ring of Barahir, how the chieftain saved the life of a Noldorin prince, Felagund, who swore undying friendship and aid in time of need, and how Felagund founded the stronghold of Nargothrond; while a second (pp. 109–10) tells the story of Beren and Lúthien from the beginning, including Beren’s request to Felagund for aid, as far as the imprisonment of Beren, Felagund, and their companions by Thû. Another extract from the Lay of Leithian (Canto VI, lines 1678–1923 and Canto VII, lines 1924–2237; The Lays of Beleriand, pp. 212–18, 224–32) relates the same events at greater length and in more detail.

The story first told in the Quenta Noldorinwa is now taken up until its end, with Lúthien becoming mortal so that she would not be separated from Beren (The Shaping of Middle-earth, pp. 110–15); and the story told in the Lay of Leithian (Cantos VIII–XIV; The Lays of Beleriand, pp. 235ff.) is then continued to the point where Tolkien abandoned the poem in 1931, just as Beren and Lúthien flee Angband and the wolf, Carcharoth, devours the Silmaril in Beren’s hand. This is accompanied by a short separate text, headed ‘a piece from the end of the poem’, which seems to refer to the Halls of the Dead in Valinor (The Lays of Beleriand, pp. 308–9).

At this stage Tolkien turned his efforts to a new, longer prose version of the ‘Silmarillion’, entitled *Quenta Silmarillion. After he had written the tale of Beren and Lúthien as far as the point at which Felagund gives his crown to Orodreth, he stopped because of its length and made a rough draft of the full story; and on the basis of this draft he made a second, shorter version which had reached the death of Beren by mid-December 1937, when Tolkien laid aside ‘The Silmarillion’ and began *The Lord of the Rings. Christopher Tolkien draws on both versions for the text in an explanatory bridging passage, while a brief extract from the published Silmarillion (pp. 182–3) brings Beren and Lúthien back to the borders of Doriath.

Christopher then looks back on the evolution of the story and raises one aspect he believes was of primary significance to his father: the fates of Beren and Lúthien after Beren’s death. He cites again their fates when both were Elves in The Book of Lost Tales, adding information about their return to Middle-earth (The Book of Lost Tales, Part Two, p. 40), and contrasting this with the fate decreed for Elves in ‘The Coming of the Valar’ (The Book of Lost Tales, Part One, p. 76) hinted at in the separate piece from the end of the Lay of Leithian. He discusses later ideas of the fate of the Elves and the choices offered to Beren and Lúthien in later versions of their story, citing The Silmarillion (p. 42), the Quenta Noldorinwa (The Shaping of Middle-earth, p. 115), and the Quenta Silmarillion (draft for the ‘short’ version of text, in *The Lost Road and Other Writings, pp. 303–4), and finishes with a summary of the version published in The Silmarillion, p. 187, in which the choice rested with Lúthien alone.

Although the Quenta Silmarillion and other works remained unfinished, Christopher Tolkien returns to earlier, usually brief accounts for the later history of the Silmaril with which Beren and Lúthien were concerned. He pieces together an account relating the return of Beren and Lúthien, the setting of the Silmaril in the Nauglafring (the necklace of the Dwarves), how possession of the necklace led to the death of Thingol and the son and grandsons of Beren and Lúthien, and how by its power Eärendil, husband of Elwing, granddaughter of Beren and Lúthien, was able to reach Valinor and obtain aid from the Valar against Morgoth. For these, Christopher uses extracts from the Quenta Noldorinwa (The Shaping of Middle-earth, pp. 132–4), The Silmarillion (p. 236), ‘The Nauglafring’ in The Book of Lost Tales (The Book of Lost Tales, Part Two, pp. 236–8), the Quenta Noldorinwa again (The Shaping of Middle-earth, p. 134), ‘The Nauglafring’ again (The Book of Lost Tales, Part Two, pp. 239–40, 242), and the Quenta Noldorinwa once more (The Shaping of Middle-earth, pp. 148–50). The end of the latter was superseded by the Quenta Noldorinwa (The Shaping of Middle-earth, p. 153) and essentially reached the form of the published Silmarillion (pp. 247–50). The account proper ends with a brief quote from the Quenta Silmarillion: ‘None saw Beren and Lúthien leave the world or marked where at last their bodies lay’ (The Lost Road and Other Writings, p. 305).

An appendix contains extracts from Tolkien’s reworking of the beginning of the Lay of Leithian, c. 1949–50. The first describes Beren and Barahir’s secret refuge (‘The Lay of Leithian Recommenced’, lines 173–98), then follows Gorlim’s treachery, with Sauron replacing Morgoth as its instigator, and Beren’s escape south (lines 199–592). This is followed by a ‘List of Names in the Original Text’ (not an index) ‘intended to assist a reader who cannot recall, among the mass of names (and forms of names), the reference of one that may be of significance in the narrative’ (Beren and Lúthien, p. 274). Some of the rarer names are given fuller explanation. Finally there is a glossary of ‘words (including forms and meanings of worlds differing from modern usage)’ (p. 286), with page references.

HISTORY

In his preface to this book Christopher Tolkien refers to a detailed study he made of the evolution of his father’s ‘Silmarillion’ writings following the publication of his own edition, The Silmarillion, in 1977. In 1981 he wrote to *Rayner Unwin about this study which he called The History of The Silmarillion:

In theory, I could produce a lot of books out of the History, and there are many possibilities and combinations of possibilities. For example, I could do ‘Beren’, with the original Lost Tale, The Lay of Leithian, and an essay on the development of the legend. My preference, if it came to anything so positive, would probably be for the treating of one legend as a developing entity, rather than give all the Lost Tales at one go; but the difficulties of exposition in detail would in such a case be great, because one would have to explain so often what was happening elsewhere, in other unpublished writings.

He told Unwin ‘that I would enjoy writing a book called “Beren” on the lines I suggested: but the problem would be its organization, so that the matter was comprehensible without the editor becoming overpowering’ (p. 10).

Now after many years during which ‘a large part of the immense store of manuscripts pertaining to the First Age, or Elder Days, has been published, in close and detailed editions; chiefly in volumes of *The History of Middle-earth’ (p. 11), Christopher returned to his original idea. Had it been published then, it ‘would have brought to light much hitherto unknown and unavailable writing. But this book [Beren and Lúthien] does not offer a single page of original and unpublished work. What then is the need, now, for such a book?’ In The History of Middle-earth the story of Beren and Lúthien, written by Tolkien during a wide span of years, is spread over several books and entangled with other events. ‘To follow the story … as a single and well-defined narrative’ (p. 12) is not easy. For the present book, then, on the one hand Christopher has

tried to separate the story of Beren and Tinúviel (Lúthien) so that it stands alone, so far as that can be done (in my opinion) without distortion. On the other hand, I have wished to show how this fundamental story evolved over the years. In my foreword to the first volume of The Book of Lost Tales I said of the changes in the stories …

development was seldom by outright rejection – far more often it was by subtle transformation in stages, so that the growth of the legends (the process, for instance, by which the Nargothrond story made contact with that of Beren and Lúthien, a contact not even hinted at in the Lost Tales, though both elements were present) can seem like the growth of legends among peoples, the product of many minds and generations.

It is an essential feature … that these developments … are shown in my father’s own words, for the method that I have employed is the extraction of passages from much longer manuscripts in prose or verse written over many years. [pp. 12–13]

Christopher notes that this brings ‘to light passages of close description or dramatic immediacy that are lost in the summary, condensed manner characteristic of so much Silmarillion narrative writing’, as well as elements ‘that were later altogether lost’ (p. 13), such as Tevildo, Prince of Cats.

Finally, acknowledging that the volumes of The History of Middle-earth ‘may well present a deterrent aspect, it was Christopher’s ‘hope, in composing this book, that it would show how the creation of an ancient legend of Middle-earth, changing and growing over many years, reflected the search of the author for a presentation of the myth nearer to his desire’ (p. 14). Since ‘the decision of what to include and what to exclude … could only be a matter of personal and often questionable judgement … there can be no attainable “correct way”’ (p. 16).

We should note, in case of changes to the text or page breaks of Beren and Lúthien in the eleventh hour, that we have written this article on the basis of a proof copy, kindly provided us by HarperCollins in advance of publication.

Berkshire. In summer 1912 Tolkien went on a walking tour in this county in the south-east of England, where he made several drawings and watercolours. He was especially interested in the local landscape and buildings, such as the church of St Michael, founded in Anglo-Saxon times but rebuilt in various periods, at Lambourn where King Alfred once had a manor. Tolkien drew its late Norman west doorway, a detail of its keystone, and a gargoyle above a Gothic window. (See Artist and Illustrator, figs. 11, 13.) He also went to East-bury, where he drew the High Street and picturesque thatched cottages (Artist and Illustrator, fig. 12), one of which still stands. In later years he was attracted, with his family, to the Vale of the White Horse with its famous stylized figure of a horse, around 374 feet long, cut into the grass on a chalk hillside c. 100 BC, and the ancient long-barrow known as Wayland’s Smithy (c. 2000 BC).

All three of Tolkien’s sons attended the Oratory School when it was located at Caversham, near Reading in Berkshire. When he returned to Oxford in 1972 after his wife’s death Tolkien often visited his youngest son, *Christopher, who at that time lived with his wife and children in the village of West Hanney in Berkshire (since 1974 part of Oxfordshire).

In his poems and stories the character Tom Bombadil, Tolkien said, was ‘the spirit of the (vanishing) Oxford and Berkshire countryside’ (letter to Stanley Unwin, 16 December 1937, Letters, p. 26), and the Barrow-downs near Tom’s home in *The Lord of the Rings (Book I, Chapter 8) may be indebted to the many prehistoric graves found in Berkshire.

Bibliographies. The standard history of the publication of Tolkien’s works is J.R.R. Tolkien: A Descriptive Bibliography by Wayne G. Hammond with the assistance of Douglas A. Anderson (1993). Except for a few minor omissions it is a comprehensive account (to mid-1992) of Tolkien’s books and the books to which he contributed, with details of content, binding, and textual changes in discrete editions and printings; of his contributions to periodicals, his published letters and art, interviews, recordings, and miscellanea; and of translations of his writings. Addenda and corrigenda to the Bibliography, as well as articles on Tolkien bibliography addressed to the serious enthusiast, have been published in the occasional magazine The Tolkien Collector (begun 1992). A second edition is planned. An online supplement and extension of the Bibliography, by Neil Holford, is at www.tolkienbooks.net.

For concise checklists of Tolkien’s principal works, and of his published art and poetry, see the appendix in the second volume of the Reader’s Guide. Other checklists, created by fans and societies, may be found online, such as ‘A Chronological Bibliography of the Writings of J.R.R. Tolkien’ by Åke Bertenstam, at www.forodrim.org/arda/tbchron.html; most of these, however, are limited in detail and have not been kept up to date.

The most important of the early bibliographies of writings about Tolkien, Tolkien Criticism: An Annotated Checklist by Richard C. West (1970, an expansion of a work that appeared in the journal Extrapolation for December 1968), today is useful chiefly for the picture it affords of Tolkien studies in their infancy. A list of everything of major interest on Tolkien published to that date, it also includes less important material but omits work published in fan magazines (‘fanzines’). Entries considered by West to be of special note are marked with an asterisk. A second edition of Tolkien Criticism, published in 1981, is much enlarged but also more selective, to keep its length within bounds, the literature about Tolkien having expanded greatly the previous decade. Essays and reviews from three leading American fanzines (Mythlore, Orcrist, and the Tolkien Journal) were now cited. All entries in West’s second edition are to be considered ‘definitely of real importance’ to Tolkien studies ‘through the greater part of 1980, while what is excluded is much of what I consider peripheral’ (p. xi).

For Modern Fiction Studies 50, no. 4 (Winter 2004) West produced ‘A Tolkien Checklist: Selected Criticism 1981–2004’, giving his subjective choices for ‘some of the best critical studies’ of Tolkien (p. 1015). Michael D.C. Drout and Hilary Wynne include an extensive bibliography, without annotations, in ‘Tom Shippey’s J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century and a Look Back at Tolkien Criticism since 1982’, Envoi: A Review Journal of Medieval Literature 9, no. 1 (Fall 2000). This has been continued in the journal Tolkien Studies, by David Bratman and other hands.

J.R.R. Tolkien: Six Decades of Criticism by Judith A. Johnson (1986) is more expansive than West’s bibliography in its coverage of fan as well as mainstream publications (through 1984), and in its annotations provides a welcome alternative point of view to West, but is otherwise less helpful as a guide to scholarship. Valuable writings about Tolkien are listed in the dubious company of Tolkien-inspired blank books and other ‘Tolkieniana’. And whereas West’s second edition is divided simply into two sections, Tolkien’s own writings arranged chronologically, and critical works about Tolkien listed alphabetically by author or (when no author is given) by title, the entries in Johnson are organized in a difficult scheme of multiple chronological and alphabetical divisions and subdivisions. Johnson’s book, moreover, suffers from errors and inconsistencies.