Lúthien and Beren

The complex tale of their love for each other and the quest they are forced to embark upon is a story of triumph against overwhelming odds but ending in tragedy.

It appears in The Silmarillion, the epic poem The Lay of Leithian, the Grey Annals section of The War of the Jewels, and in the texts collected in the 2017 book Beren and Lúthien.

It is based principally on the classical tale of Orpheus and Eurydice in the underworld, supplemented by multiple story elements from myths, legends, and folktales from different periods.

These include the Finnish Kalevala, the Welsh Mabinogion, the Saga of the Volsungs, the Prose Edda, and the folktale "Rapunzel".

Lúthien was a Telerin (Sindarin) princess, the only child of Elu Thingol, king of Doriath, and his queen, Melian the Maia, making her half-royal, half-divine.

Lúthien's romance with the mortal man Beren is considered the "chief" of the Silmarillion tales by Tolkien himself; he called it "the kernel of the mythology".

Lúthien was first cousin once removed of Galadriel (also Arwen's grandmother), whose mother, Eärwen of Alqualondë, was the daughter of Thingol's brother.

[T 3][1] The name Lúthien appears to mean "daughter of flowers" in a Beleriandic dialect of Sindarin, but it can also be translated "blossom".

[T 4] Beren saw Lúthien dancing under moonrise in her father's forest, and fell in love with her, captivated by her beauty.

One day in summer when Lúthien was dancing on a green hill surrounded by hemlocks,[3] she sang, awakening Beren.

In his hour of despair, she appeared before him, and in the Hidden Kingdom of Doriath set her hand in his and cradled his head against her breast.

Finding the seemingly dead Beren, she fell down beside him in grief, but with the rising sun he awoke and they were reunited.

Meanwhile, Carcharoth slaughtered all the living beings he came across in his frenzied flight, both empowered and tormented by the jewel burning his stomach.

Thingol decided to unite the greatest works of the Dwarves and the Elves – the Nauglamír and the Silmaril – and hired Dwarf smiths from Nogrod.

This hastened Beren's and Lúthien's end, since her beauty enhanced by the jewel was too bright for mortal lands to bear.

However Tolkien initially created the character of Beren as a mortal man before this in an even earlier but erased version of the tale.

[T 10] The story is also told in an epic poem in The Lays of Beleriand, upon which most of the finer details of her life and relationship to Beren is extracted from in this article, since The Silmarillion provides only a generalization of the tale.

These include the Finnish Kalevala, the Welsh Mabinogion, the Norse Saga of the Volsungs, the Icelandic Prose Edda, the Old English Genesis B, and the German folktale "Rapunzel".

Shippey comments that Tolkien "had not yet freed himself from his sources – as if trying to bring in all the older bits of literature that he liked instead of forging a story with an impetus of its own.

Where Orpheus nearly manages to retrieve Eurydice from Hades, Lúthien rescues Beren three times – from Sauron's fortress-prison of Tol-in-Gaurhoth, involving singing; from Morgoth's Angband, with the Silmaril; and by getting Mandos to restore both of them to life.

In the original myth, Eurydice meets "a second death", soon followed by the griefstruck Orpheus, whereas Tolkien has Lúthien and Beren enjoy "a second life" after their "resurrection".

[6][T 12] Robert Steed, in Mallorn, argues that Tolkien echoes and "creatively adapts" the medieval theme of the Harrowing of Hell, in the tale of Lúthien and Beren, and in other places.

The medieval tale holds that Christ spent the time between his crucifixion and resurrection down in Hell, setting the Devil's captives free with the irresistible power of his divine light.

"[T 13]Several scholars, from Randel Helms onwards, have noted that Tolkien's tale of Beren and Lúthien shares elements with folktales such as the Welsh "Culhwch and Olwen".

"[11] The Tolkien scholar John Garth, writing in the New Statesman, notes that it took a century for The Tale of Beren and Lúthien, mirroring the tale of Second Lieutenant Tolkien watching Edith dancing in a woodland glade far from the "animal horror" of the trenches, to reach publication.

[12] In a letter to his son Christopher, dated 11 July 1972, Tolkien requested the inscription below for his wife Edith's grave "for she was (and knew she was) my Lúthien.

"[T 14] In a footnote to this letter, Tolkien added "she knew the earliest form of the legend...also the poem eventually printed as Aragorn's song.