Beren and Lúthien

3.5 stars
This book is all about our well-beloved characters Luthien and Beren and we may see how they developed and changed throughout the different versions of their legend. It was lovely to have more information about Tolkien himself and to explore his world again. However, I would suggest this book only to big fans of the author and Middle-earth, because new readers may find it confusing and repetitive.

A true treat to see Tolkien's writing process for this story and its many incarnations as he revised it over the years. Any Tolkien fan will love it and I suspect those who enjoy lyrical stories, poetry and the evolution of writing a story will also appreciate it! Alan Lee's artwork is also a beautiful addition to the writing.

(03-10-22 reread) If you visit the grave of J.R.R. Tolkien and his wife, Edith, in Oxford you will notice that beneath their names are “Beren” and “Lúthien” respectively.

Beren and Lúthien is by far the most grandiose love story Tolkien ever wrote, telling the story of an elven woman who fell in love with a mortal man so much so that she managed to bring him back from death, and gave up her own immortality to be with him. To be together, the two embark on a quest to claim a Silmaril from the crown of the Dark Lord Morgoth. The echoes of this story can be felt thousands of years later in The Lord of the Rings' Aragorn and Arwen, as well as the fact that Beren and Lúthien are the great-grandparents of Elrond Half-elven (and great-great-grandparents of Arwen herself!). As such it's a story worth reading if you have any kind of Tolkien appreciation at all, even if it's just The Silmarillion chapter.

This book is not like The Children of Húrin, in that it is not simply a full novel format of Beren and Lúthien. Charting the tale from its beginnings in 1917 to subsequent iterations, changing formats from prose to poetry to prose again, Christopher Tolkien notes similarities and differences and allows the reader to get a look into Tolkien's process of myth-making. This book is ultimately a really interesting look at the development of one of the best known but least read of Tolkien's stories.

If this sounds good to you, but you are unfamiliar with Beren and Lúthien, I would recommend at the very least reading The Silmarillion chapter on them as well as the poem about them found in The Lord of the Ring before tackling this. If you do, it's a supremely rewarding read, and is a fun insight into how such ideas and concepts change in ways large and small over time.

“Among the tales of sorrow and of ruin that come down to us from the darkest of those days there are yet some in which amid weeping there is joy and under the shadow of death light that endures. And of these histories most fair still in the ears of the Elves is the tale of Beren and Lúthien.” - The Silmarillion.