Tolkien’s Lúthien: From Life to Art to Life as Art

Authors

Verlyn Flieger, retiredFollow

Abstract

Like other of his Great Tales, the stories of Húrin and Túrin, Tolkien’s story of Lúthien grew over time in both verse and prose, moving through various versions from a comic fairy tale with a child narrator reminiscent of Marie de France to a romance in rhyming couplets imitative of Chretien de Troyes. Christopher Tolkien gives an account of his father’s development of the story of Lúthien in Beren and Lúthien, the third and final volume in his Great Tales series.

My intent here is less sweeping but more focused. I want to dig more narrowly but also more deeply into one aspect of the story: the singular manner in which Tolkien used, fused, and con-fused his real-life wife Edith with his invented character of Lúthien.

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