The J. R. R. Tolkien Companion and Guide: Volume 2: Reader’s Guide PART 1. Christina Scull
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With that established it would seem to be only plain sense for Thingol to have provoked the oath by setting up a hand for hand, jewel for jewel exchange, as again he so clearly does in the Silmarillion: bring me a jewel (the Silmaril) in your hand, and I will put in your hand a compensating jewel (Lúthien’s hand). …
Yet a glance at the [Book of Lost Tales, Part Two] version shows that in the beginning these connections were simply not there. Beren does say, in his second meeting with Thingol (there Tinwelint), ‘I have a Silmaril in my hand even now’ … but in the first meeting does not make the corresponding promise. His exact words are only ‘I … will fulfil thy small desire’: which, of course, at the time of their second meeting he has still not done. [p. 278]
Katharyn W. Crabbe in J.R.R. Tolkien (rev. and expanded edn. 1988) compares Beren as a hero to Túrin; like Túrin, he suffers loss and loneliness, but is motivated not by vengeance but by love. He is brave, and ‘although his pride may lead him to attempt the seemingly impossible, it does not lead him to mindless violence. It is a productive rather than a destructive pride … unlike Túrin, whose pride leads him time after time to bad decisions and self-destructive behavior’ (p. 194).
Verlyn Flieger devotes two chapters in Splintered Light: Logos and Language in Tolkien’s World (2nd edn. 2002) to the story. She poses the questions: ‘Can the *free will of Men alter the fate of Elves? Does the fate of the Elf entangle the Man who intersects it?’ and finds that ‘both fate and free will appear to be involved … in the lives of Beren, Lúthien, and Thingol’ (p. 131). She examines their actions in this context, and in relation to the main theme of her book, that The Silmarillion is ‘a story about light. Images of light in all stages – bright, dim, whole, refracted, clear or rainbow-hued – pervade the songs and stories of the fictive. It is a world peopled with sub-creators whose interactions with and attitudes toward the light shape their world and their own destinies within it’ (p. 49).
Iwan Rhys Morus in ‘The Tale of Beren and Lúthien’, Mallorn 20 (September 1983), comments that this story is
in many ways a turning-point in the mythology for in it many of the various strands of other narratives are brought together and combined to bring about the doom of the Eldar. Indeed I would argue that one of Tolkien’s master-strokes in this tale is the irony of the fact that the Free People’s greatest achievement against Morgoth – the taking of a Silmaril from the Iron Crown – is the seed that brings about their eventual utter downfall. [p. 19]
He discusses the influence of the episode at Roos on the story, and notes that this is not Tolkien’s only use of the motif of the ‘encounter in the woods’, citing among others Aragorn and Arwen, Thingol and Melian, Eöl and Aredhel, and Aldarion and Erendis. He suggests possible sources for elements of the story, in particular in the *Kalevala ‘the journey of Väinämöinen and Lemminkäinen to steal the Sampo, in which Väinämöinen’s singing casts the whole of Pohja into deep slumber’, and several wizards’ singing-contests.
Around this central core Tolkien has piled a plethora of mythic themes and motifs. The striking image of a hand in a wolf’s mouth is straight from the Prose Edda: Fenris and the god Tyr. Lúthien with her escape via a rope of her own hair from prison is of course Rapunzel from Grimms’ Fairy Tales. The hunting of Carcharoth recalls the great quest for the Twrch Trwyth in ‘Culwch ac Olwen’ whilst the great hound Huan reminds me strongly of the most faithful of wolfhounds: Gelert in the old Welsh legend. [p. 22]
Richard C. West in ‘Real-world Myth in a Secondary World’, Tolkien the Medievalist, ed. Jane Chance (2003), also comments on resonances from various sources which a reader might recognize and suppose to have influenced elements of the story. But he quite rightly points out that similarities do not necessarily mean influence, and that the differences are often far more marked than the similarities. As one example he cites ‘Rapunzel’, one of the Märchen collected by the Brothers Grimm, remarking that ‘Lúthien lets her hair down not just to allow her lover to reach her but to enable her to reach him’ (p. 263). Myth, legend, and fairy-tale ‘were an integral part of [Tolkien’s] mental furniture and imaginative make-up’, and what we read ‘over and over are echoes, even when we cannot pinpoint an exact source’ (p. 264). West cites several works which may have provided ‘echoes’ for the story of Beren and Lúthien: Robin Hood and his outlaw band for Barahir; Tristan and Iseult living in the woods; the killing one by one of Finrod and Beren’s companions ‘is strongly reminiscent of the sons of King Völsung being killed one each night until only Sigmund survives’; Sauron’s shape-shifting recalls the Norse god Loki and the Greek Nereus; Carcharoth biting off Beren’s hand recalls Fenris Wolf and Tyr; Huan plays the same role as the magical helper in many fairy-tales; Lúthien in her pleading before Mandos ‘reenacts the descent into the underworld of Orpheus in Greek mythology or of Ishtar in Babylonian to recover a loved one, but with a happier result: much as in the Middle English *Sir Orfeo …’ (p. 265).
In another essay, ‘“And She Named Her Own Name”: Being True to One’s Word in Tolkien’s Middle-earth’, Tolkien Studies 2 (2005), Richard C. West points out that whereas in early versions of the story both Lúthien and Beren occasionally lie, and this is justified by the narrator, in the latest version Lúthien’s speaks only truth. He connects this with a common theme in Tolkien’s fiction, ‘that it is dangerous to use the weapons employed by evil even with good intentions’ (p. 4).
Randel Helms briefly discusses the development of the Beren and Lúthien story in his Tolkien and the Silmarils (1981), arguing that ‘its chief written source’ is the tale of ‘Culwch and Olwen’ in The Mabinogion (p. 15). Granted, as Carl Phelpstead does in Tolkien and Wales: Language, Literature and Identity (2011), that ‘Tolkien’s use of Culhwch and Olwen seems incontrovertible’ (p. 73), Helms’s assertion is perhaps too bold, considering the number of other possible sources, not to mention original invention by Tolkien.
Beren and Lúthien. Edition of texts relating the story of Beren and Lúthien from *‘The Silmarillion’, edited by *Christopher Tolkien. First published in Great Britain by HarperCollins, London, and in the United States by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Boston, in June 2017.
The core of this book is not a single or composite telling of the story of Beren and Lúthien, but a collection of texts or extracts arranged to show its evolution over a long period. Christopher Tolkien provides a biographical and literary introduction (‘Notes on the Elder Days’), as well as a framework, in which he introduces each text and briefly gives relevant information about its source and how it fits into the wider mythology. (In the Reader’s Guide the development of the story of Beren and Lúthien is discussed mainly in the preceding article, *‘Of Beren and Lúthien’, and partly in *‘Of the Ruin of Doriath’ and *‘The Voyage of Eärendil and the War of Wrath’. Each of these begins with a summary of the chapter in *The Silmarillion, then the story as told in *The Book of Lost Tales, followed by an account, text by text, of what was changed or added over the years. Each of the component texts also has its own entry in the present book.)
SUMMARY OF THE CONTENTS
Two extracts from the *Quenta Noldorinwa (1930) (*The Shaping of Middle-earth, pp. 88, 85) describe the making of the Silmarils and the meeting of Lúthien’s parents, Melian the fay and Thingol, one of the leaders of the Elves. An extract from *The Book of Lost Tales, Part Two (pp. 9, 10) then tells how Gwendeling and Tinwelint (Melian and Thingol) established a guarded realm; and this is followed by the complete ‘Tale of Tinúviel’ from The Book of Lost Tales, Part Two (pp. 10–41).
A synopsis of the story as it appeared in the *Sketch of the Mythology (c. 1926; The Shaping of Middle-earth, pp. 24–5) illustrates that Thû the hunter had now replaced Tevildo, and Beren was now a man, son of Barahir, a chieftain of Men. Next, an extract from the *Lay of Leithian (Canto II, lines 151–400; *The Lays of Beleriand, pp. 162–8) tells how Beren and Barahir’s refuge was betrayed to Morgoth by Gorlim, one of their companions, and how Beren, absent at the time of the attack, recovered a ring taken from his dead father’s hand.
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