Beren and Lúthien
Painstakingly restored from Tolkien’s manuscripts and presented for the first time as a continuous and standalone story, the epic tale of Beren and Lúthien will reunite fans of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings with Elves and Men, Dwarves and Orcs and the rich landscape and creatures unique to Tolkien’s Middle-earth.The tale of Beren and Lúthien was, or became, an essential element in the evolution of The Silmarillion, the myths and legends of the First Age of the World conceived by J.R.R. Tolkien. Returning from France and the battle of the Somme at the end of 1916, he wrote the tale in the following year.Essential to the story, and never changed, is the fate that shadowed the love of Beren and Lúthien: for Beren was a mortal man, but Lúthien was an immortal Elf. Her father, a great Elvish lord, in deep opposition to Beren, imposed on him an impossible task that he must perform before he might wed Lúthien. This is the kernel of the legend; and it leads to the supremely heroic attempt of Beren and Lúthien together to rob the greatest of all evil beings, Melkor, called Morgoth, the Black Enemy, of a Silmaril.In this book Christopher Tolkien has attempted to extract the story of Beren and Lúthien from the comprehensive work in which it was embedded; but that story was itself changing as it developed new associations within the larger history. To show something of the process whereby this legend of Middle-earth evolved over the years, he has told the story in his father's own words by giving, first, its original form, and then passages in prose and verse from later texts that illustrate the narrative as it changed. Presented together for the first time, they reveal aspects of the story, both in event and in narrative immediacy, that were afterwards lost.
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Published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2017
All texts and materials by J.R.R. Tolkien © The Tolkien Estate Limited 2017
Preface, Notes and all other materials © C.R. Tolkien 2017
Illustrations © Alan Lee 2017
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Source ISBN: 9780008214227
Ebook Edition © March 2018 ISBN: 9780008214210
Version: 2018-03-29
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Contents
A Passage from the ‘Sketch of the Mythology’
A Passage Extracted from The Lay of Leithian
A Passage Extracted from the Quenta
A Second Extract from The Lay of Leithian
A Further Extract from the Quenta
The Narrative in The Lay of Leithian to Its Termination
The Return of Beren and Lúthien According to the Quenta Noldorinwa
Extract from the Lost Tale of the Nauglafring
‘yet now did he see Tinúviel dancing in the twilight’
‘but Tevildo caught sight of her where she was perched’
‘no leaves they had, but ravens dark / sat thick as leaves on bough and bark’
‘Now ringed about with wolves they stand, / and fear their doom.’
‘Then the brothers rode off, but shot back at Huan treacherously’
‘On the bridge of woe / in mantle wrapped at dead of night / she sat and sang’
‘now down there swooped / Thorondor the King of Eagles, stooped’
‘fluttering before his eyes, she wound / a mazy-wingéd dance’
After the publication of The Silmarillion in 1977 I spent several years investigating the earlier history of the work, and writing a book which I called The History of The Silmarillion. Later this became the (somewhat shortened) basis of the earlier volumes of The History of Middle-earth.
In 1981 I wrote at length to Rayner Unwin, the chairman of Allen and Unwin, giving him an account of what I had been, and was still, doing. At that time, as I informed him, the book was 1,968 pages long and sixteen and a half inches across, and obviously not for publication. I said to him: ‘If and/or when you see this book, you will perceive immediately why I have said that it is in no conceivable way publishable. The textual and other discussions are far too detailed and minute; the size of it is (and will become progressively more so) prohibitive. It is done partly for my own satisfaction in getting things right, and because I wanted to know how the whole conception did in reality evolve from the earliest origins …
‘If there is a future for such enquiries, I want to make as sure as I can that any later research into JRRT’s “literary history” is not turned into a nonsense by mistaking the actual course of its evolution. The chaos and intrinsic difficulty of many of the papers (the layer upon layer of changes in a single manuscript page, the vital clues on scattered scraps found anywhere in the archive, the texts written on the backs of other works, the disordering and separation of manuscripts, the near or total illegibility in places, is simply inexaggerable …
‘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>fn1, 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 to 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.’
I said that I would enjoy writing a book called ‘Beren’ on the lines I suggested: but ‘the problem would be its organisation, so that the matter was comprehensible without the editor becoming overpowering.’
When I wrote this I meant what I said about publication: I had no thought of its possibility, other than my idea of selecting a single legend ‘as a developing entity’. I seem now to have done precisely that – though with no thought of what I had said in my letter to Rayner Unwin thirty-five years ago: I had altogether forgotten it, until I came on it by chance when this book was all but completed.
