Beren and Lúthien by JRR Tolkien (ed: Christopher Tolkien) – digested read
‘All at once appeared some elves, who were not feeling quite themselves’
After the publication of The Silmarillion, which I found gathering dust in my father’s attic long after his death, I went rootling through his house in search of other discarded manuscripts. Eventually, I managed to assemble a manuscript of 17,835 pages that, for some reason, Allen and Unwin – like my father – believed to be unpublishable. Undeterred, I pressed on with editing these invaluable jottings to produce as many posthumous works as my father had managed to complete while he was alive along with a 12-volume history of Middle-earth without which any reading of The Lord of the Rings is pointless.
I should also add that though everything that is included in this book has been published elsewhere – I point readers in particular towards The Silmarillion, the Lost Tales, the Lay of Leithian and the Quenta Noldorinwa – this is the first time, and almost certainly the last, that anyone has tried to extract the story of Beren and Lúthien into a single coherent whole and explain how the narrative developed.
Thus Beren didst espy fair Lúthien
The fairest maiden born of men,
And all at once his heart did skip
For Morgoth had been a bad trip.
There had he done battle with Sauron
In rhyming verse that didst go on and on.
All at once appeared some elves
Who were not feeling quite themselves,
‘Sleep, O unhappy, tortured thrall
Thou art invited to the ball
For thine eyes have seen the glory
Of this never-ending story.’
