It is a beautiful (and tragic) story of love between an immortal elf and a mortal man, one that is echoed in the love story of Aragorn and Arwen in The Lord of the Rings trilogy. Tinúviel was dancing there To music of a pipe unseen, And light of stars was in her hair, And in her raiment glimmering. The character Aragorn in The Lord of the Rings recounts the scene when talking with Frodo, reciting a portion of the story, The leaves were long, the grass was green, The hemlock-umbels tall and fair, And in the glade a light was seen Of stars in shadow shimmering. In the romantic fairy story, the main protagonist of the tale, Beren, sees Lúthien dancing in the forest and is enraptured by her beauty. In those days her hair was raven, her skin clear, her eyes brighter than you have seen them, and she could sing – and dance… I will say no more now. It was first conceived in a small woodland glade filled with hemlocks at Roo in Yorkshire (where I was for a brief time in command of an outpost of the Humber Garrison in 1917, and she was able to live with me for a while). I never called Edith Lúthien – but she was the source of the story that in time became the chief part of the Silmarillion. In a letter to his son Christopher a year after his wife’s death, Tolkien wrote about the origins of this tale. First called the Tale of Tinúviel, the story was born out of his own deep love for his wife, Edith. Tolkien is most well known for his epic Lord of the Rings trilogy and whimsical fantasy tale The Hobbit, the author did not think either of these stories compared to a fictional tale that became the basis for everything he wrote. The author explained in a letter how everything he wrote was founded on the romantic fairy story of Beren and Luthien.

Beren tolkien