Day 108 - Tolkien: A love story

I discovered something new about J.R.R. Tolkien today: he was deeply in love with his wife, Edith. Their love is evident right to the end. The couple share a grave and a tombstone in Wolvercote Cemetery which sits on the outskirts of Oxford. On the grave are their names -- Edith Mary Tolkien and John Ronald Reuel Tolkien. Edith passed away in 1971 and Tolkien two years later. The years of their lives are listed below their names. But if you visit their relatively simple grave, as we did today, you will notice two further names listed below their full names: Luthien and Baren.

Tolkien met Edith in Birmingham when he was 16 and she 19. They shared a mischievous nature, and are reputed to have frequented tea shops from which they would throw lumps of sugar at people walking past. They were soon in love. The problem: By the time he was 18, Tolkien's school work was suffering, and his guardian (his parents were both deceased) blamed Roman Catholic Tolkien's relationship with the Protestant older woman.

Tolkien's guardian threatened to stop him from going to university if he refused to stop seeing Edith until he was 21. Tolkien agreed, and did not see Edith for almost three years. However, on the eve of his 21st birthday, he wrote to her saying he still loved her. Thinking Tolkien no longer cared for her, Edith had agreed to an engagement, but upon hearing that Tolkien still loved her, she broke it off. One week later, they were engaged.

Tolkien finished university then when to France to fight in the First World War. From the lice that were rife in the trenches, he caught trench fever, and eventually was sent back to England due to his recurring illness. While stationed at Kingston upon Hull, he went for a walk in the nearby woods with Edith. She began to dance for him among some flowering hemlock, and it was this dance that would later inspire his love story between the mortal man Beren met the immortal Elf-maiden Luthien.

Tolkien tells the tale in several works. In the story, Beren dies and as a mortal leaves the world. Luthien dies in grief, and as an elf goes to the halls of Mandos. Here she sings of her lost love and the fact that she will never see Beren again. Her song moves Mandos to pity her and he agrees to restore them both to life, but tells Luthien that she too will now be mortal.

After her death, Tolkien said of Edith: "In those days [when she had danced in the hemlock], her hair was raven, her skin clear, her eyes brighter than you have seen them, and she could sing—and dance. But the story has gone crooked, and I am left, and I cannot plead before the inexorable Mandos."

You can't help but hope that J.R.R. and Edith have once again found each other.