Beren and Luthien

Painstakingly restored from Tolkien’s manuscripts and presented for the first time as a fully 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 ofThe 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 wrotethe tale in the following year.

Essential to the story, and never changed, is the fate that shadowed the love of Beren andLúthien: for Beren was a mortal man, but Lúthien was an immortal Elf. Her father, a greatElvish lord, in deep opposition to Beren, imposed on him an impossible task that he mustperform before he might wed Lúthien. This is the kernel of the legend; and it leads to thesupremely heroic attempt of Beren and Lúthien together to rob the greatest of all evilbeings, Melkor, called Morgoth, the Black Enemy, of a Silmaril.

In this book Christopher Tolkien has attempted to extract the story of Beren and Lúthienfrom the comprehensive work in which it was embedded; but that story was itself changingas it developed new associations within the larger history. To show something of theprocess whereby this legend of Middle-earth evolved over the years, he has told the storyin his father's own words by giving, first, its original form, and then passages in prose andverse from later texts that illustrate the narrative as it changed. Presented together for thefirst time, they reveal aspects of the story, both in event and in narrative immediacy, thatwere afterwards lost.