While she considered how to proceed, Edith's guardian, solicitor Stephen Gateley, found her rooms at Mrs. Faulkner's boarding house at 37 Duchess Road, Birmingham.

Edith first met Tolkien early in 1908, when he and his younger brother Hilary were moved into 37 Duchess Road by their guardian, Fr.

[10] Edith also played the organ at her local Church of England parish, which she later blamed for her subsequent lifetime of back problems.

Aside from the local Vicar, however, the Jessops hosted few visitors and, aside from her school friend Molly Field, Edith felt starved of companionship of her own age.

"[10] However, on the evening of his twenty-first birthday, Tolkien wrote a letter to Edith,[11] which contained a declaration of his love and asked her to marry him.

She replied saying that she had recently become engaged to her friend Molly's brother, Warwickshire farmer George Field, but implied that she had done so only because she felt, "on the shelf", and believed that Tolkien had forgotten her.

[13] According to the couple's children John and Priscilla, "Their respective guardians were not enthusiastic, although Father Francis eventually gave his blessing.

Because her "Uncle Jessop", "like many of his age and class, was strongly anti-Catholic", Edith, who feared his explosive temper, at first resisted her fiancé's demands.

[20] Soon after their wedding, Tolkien commenced a course at the British Army signals school at Otley, and in order to be as close to his military camp as possible, Edith moved with her cousin Jennie Grove to a cottage in the village of Great Haywood, where she lived from April 1916 to February 1917.

[20] In a 1941 letter to their son Michael, Tolkien expressed admiration for his wife's willingness to marry a man with no job, little money, and no prospects except the likelihood of being killed in the Great War.

[23] Tolkien was subsequently commissioned as a second lieutenant into the Lancashire Fusiliers, transferring to the 11th (Service) Battalion, part of the 25th Division, with the British Expeditionary Force.

After spending a last night with Edith at the Plough & Harrow Hotel in Birmingham, Tolkien reported to a troop ship at Folkestone[24] and arrived in France on 4 June 1916.

In the second decade of marriage her anti-Catholic feelings hardened, and by the time the family returned to Oxford in 1925 she was showing resentment of Ronald taking the children to church.

Nor could he discuss her feelings with her in a rational manner, certainly not with the lucidity he demonstrated in his theological arguments with author Lewis: to Edith he presented only his emotional attachment to religion, of which she had little understanding.

Occasionally, her smouldering anger about church-going burst into a fury; but at last after one such outburst in 1940 there was true reconciliation between her and Ronald, in which she explained her feelings and even declared that she wished to resume the practice of her religion.

In the event she did not return to regular church-going, but for the rest of her life she showed no resentment of Catholicism, and indeed delighted to take an interest in church affairs, so that it appeared even to friends who were Catholics that she was an active church-goer.

It was visible in the small things, the almost absurd degree in which each worried about the other's health, and the care in which they chose and wrapped each other's birthday presents; and in the large matters, the way in which Ronald willingly abandoned such a large part of his life in retirement to give Edith the last years in Bournemouth that he felt she deserved, and the degree in which she showed pride in his fame as an author.

Frequent subjects were the doings of the children, especially Christopher, the grandchildren, the garden in which I think Ronald enjoyed working, the iniquities of the Labour Party, the rising price of food, the changes for the worse in the Oxford shops and the difficulty in buying certain groceries.

Without a liking for the homely and domestic, he could not have written The Hobbit, or created Frodo and Sam Gamgee, characters that sustain quite convincingly the story of The Lord of the Rings, and link the high romance to the everyday and the ordinary.

[33]After his retirement during the 1960s, Tolkien decided to move with Edith to a location near Bournemouth, which was then a resort town patronised by the British upper class.

Although his status as a best-selling author gave them both easy entry into local society, Tolkien was never comfortable in Bournemouth and missed the company of his fellow intellectuals.

Their grandson Simon Tolkien states on his website that Edith loved spending time at Bournemouth's Miramar Hotel.

After Beren was captured by the forces of the dark lord Morgoth, Lúthien rode to his rescue upon the talking wolfhound Huan.

Ultimately, when Beren was slain in battle against the demonic wolf Carcharoth, Lúthien, like Orpheus, approached the Valar gods and persuaded them to restore her beloved to life.

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).