Talking Meme: Tolkien!

starsandsea asked me to talk about Tolkien a little! And I think this time I'm going to take her literally and talk about the Professor a bit: specifically, his relationship with his wife and the way that became a theme in his work.

For starters, you have to know (and most of you probably do) that the Aragorn/Arwen love story in Lord of the Rings is basically a retelling of the Silmarillion's major love story between Beren and Luthien. Many of the basics of the two stories are exactly the same: a human man encounters by chance an elven maiden dancing in a forest and they fall in love. But the fates of Elves and Men are different: Elves live on eternally, while Men die and pass beyond the world to an unknown fate. In both stories, the maiden's father resists their love and sets obstacles in their way, demanding extravagant proofs of the man's worthiness. In both stories, the man eventually proves his worth and wins the hand of the maiden. And in both stories, the maiden chooses to forsake her immortal birthright and become mortal; when the man dies the maiden dies also of grief and her soul is lost to Arda forever.

What I didn't know as a younger reader was that Beren and Luthien (and thus by extension Aragorn and Arwen) are basically self-inserts for Tolkien and his wife. He met Edith when he was 16 and she was 19 (an age difference that at the time must have felt like the age difference between his female elves and male humans) and fell in love. His guardian (they were both orphans) disapproved and forbade him to have any contact with her until he was 21. Tolkien acquiesced and cut all ties for four years--and on the day of his 21st birthday wrote her a letter saying he loved her still and he hoped she would marry him. She wrote back saying she was engaged to someone else, but made it clear that she had assumed he had forgotten her and she still loved him. Tolkien immediately set off to where she was living, she met him at the station, and at the end of the day returned her ring and was engaged to Tolkien. They married soon after, just before he left to fight in France. She was Anglican and converted to Roman Catholicism to marry him--by the beliefs of the time, effectively giving up her place in the afterlife, like Luthien and Arwen.

When he was on leave from World War I, he came back to England and met her in a blossoming hemlock grove, where she danced for him--an image that became essential to both of his great romances. After the war, they had four children together, and although their marriage wasn't always happy (they clashed about religion; she didn't like being the wife of a professor) it seems to have been a good marriage.

But here is where real life and the canon part ways, and here is where I always tear up: unlike Luthien and Arwen, Edith Tolkien died first. Tolkien wrote his son after her death, "I never called Edith Luthien--but she was the source of the story that in time became the chief part of the Silmarillion. . . . But the story has gone crooked, & I am left, and I cannot plead before the inexorable Mandos."

With this in mind, it always seems both fitting and heartbreaking that as far as Tolkien was concerned, the death of Arwen is the end of his world: “There at last when the mallorn-leaves were falling, but spring had not yet come, she laid herself to rest upon Cerin Amroth; and there is her green grave, until the world is changed, and all the days of her life are utterly forgotten by the men that come after, and elanor and nimphredil bloom no more east of the sea.

“Here ends this tale, as it has come to us from the South; and with the passing of Evenstar no more is said in this book of the days of old.”