On the bright green grass in the Catholic section of Wolvercote Cemetery near Oxford, among the lavishly adorned tombstones mostly bearing the names of Polish immigrants, stands one simple gray granite stone, modestly engraved with the names of two characters from one of the most widely-read fantasy books ever written.
Beren and Luthien.
(From J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Silmarillion)“But wandering in the summer in the woods of Neldoreth he came upon Luthien, daughter of Thingol and Melian, at a time of evening under moonrise, as she danced upon the unfading grass in the glades beside Esgalduin. Then all memory of his pain departed from him, and he fell into an enchantment; for Luthien was the most beautiful of all the Children of Iluvatar. Blue was her raiment as the unclouded heaven, but her eyes were grey as the starlit evening; her mantle was sewn with golden flowers, but her hair was dark as the shadows of twilight. As the light upon the leaves of trees, as the voice of clear waters, as the stars above the mists of the world, such was her glory and her loveliness; and in her face was a shining light.”
But the couple buried there were real people, even if their story could have been taken out of a fairy tale. He was an author, poet, linguist, and one of the most important fantasy writers of the modern era, who was (and is still) admired throughout the world to an unprecedented extent, and she was his beloved wife, who settled (or was forced to settle?) for the adoration of her own family.
John Ronald Reuel Tolkien was born in Bloemfontein, South Africa, but grew up as an orphan in late 19th century England. He lost his father when he was only four years old, and his mother when he was twelve. When Arthur Tolkien died, the widowed mother Mabel did everything in her power to provide a good life for her two sons – Ronald (of his three names, this was the name he was called by his family and close acquaintances) and young Hilary who was only a year old.
Mabel, who was an educated woman beyond what was common at the time, raised her sons in the green suburbs of Birmingham and gave them an excellent home education. Despite their poverty, it was a happy childhood. Ronald learned to love the things that filled his early life with wonder: the green trees and the countryside, his mother Mabel, and starting at the age of four – words and languages.
From the moment he learned to read, and as he progressed in his studies, Tolkien was captivated by linguistics. While his friends struggled with the correct spelling of modern English, he studied its origins and was fascinated by textbooks on ancient languages like Greek, Welsh, and Gothic.
His mother Mabel died of diabetes when she was only 34. Insulin, which could have saved her life, would only be discovered some two decades after her death. The children, who suddenly lost the wonderful environment they had grown up in along with their beloved mother, grieved bitterly. In her will, Mabel appointed Father Francis Xavier Morgan as their guardian, and the boys moved to live in the city of Birmingham itself.
Father Morgan was the priest of the small Catholic congregation that Mabel and the children had joined only four years earlier. This happened despite the protests of her family and the family of her late husband, who subsequently stopped supporting her financially. Father Francis’ visits to the Tolkien family home started out as part of his role as a dedicated parish priest, but very quickly he became a close friend to the lonely Mabel and a sort of “uncle” who provided much-needed kindness and amusement to her two sons. As Tolkien himself wrote to his own sons later in life, Father Francis was more present and significant to them than many “real” fathers.
After a rather unhappy period during which the children lived with a childless relative for a few years, Father Francis decided to move them into Mrs. Faulkner’s home on Duchess Road, near where many members of his congregation lived.
Aside from Mrs. Faulkner, the two-story house was also home to her husband Louis (who enjoyed a drink or two), their daughter Helen, the maid Annie, and another tenant who rented the room that was just below the boys’ room – a young girl named Edith Bratt. Edith was also an orphan, but that was where any similarity between her and the Tolkien brothers, with whom she’d be sharing this domestic space in the years to come, ended. While the boys came from a distinguished British lineage and benefited from a fine childhood education, she was the illegitimate daughter of Frances Bratt of Gloucester. Edith was over three years older than Ronald, her interests included music and sewing, and – she was a Protestant! This would soon become a major obstacle.
Edith was also incredibly kind, a gray-eyed beauty, and quite bored. When her guardian decided that she should live in the room in Mrs. Faulkner’s house, he thought that since she was studying music at the girls’ school, she’d be able to practice on the piano in the main room of the house. He hoped that in time she’d be able to work as a professional musician. But although she enjoyed Edith’s musical accompaniment during the evening singing sessions she occasionally hosted, Mrs. Faulkner wasn’t so generous when Edith sat down in front of the piano to practice. “My dear Edith” she’d say sourly, “I think that’s enough for now.”
When the boys arrived at the gloomy house with its climbing vines and forlorn lace curtains, it was like a breath of fresh air for Edith. She was especially fond of Ronald, the serious and talented young man. She discovered that he could be incredibly polite when necessary, but also goof around cheerfully at other times.
Despite their age gap, Ronald and Edith quickly became friends. He was mature for his age and she acted younger than hers. Together with Hilary, his mischievous brother, they conspired against the “old lady” who ran the house with an iron fist: they held secret parties in Edith’s room and went on long hikes together. As time went on, Edith and Ronald grew closer and closer, and the relationship that began as a friendship blossomed into young love.
Edith showed no interest in Ronald’s first great love (studying ancient languages and inventing new ones) and had received a much simpler education than he had. And yet they found enough topics of conversation to occupy long hours spent wandering the streets and teahouses of Birmingham.
They even came up with a private whistle-call that was meant just for them. “When Ronald heard it in the early morning or at bedtime,” Tolkien’s biographer Humphrey Carpenter explained, “he would go to his window and lean out to see Edith waiting at her own window below.”
In a letter to Edith years later, Tolkien recalled with longing, “My first kiss to you and your first kiss to me (which was almost accidental)—Our goodnights when sometimes you were in your little white nightgown, and our absurd long window talks; and how we watched the sun come up over town through the mist and Big Ben toll hour after hour, and the moths almost used to frighten you away—and our whistle-call—and our cycle-rides—and the fire talks—and to three great kisses.”
But no great romantic love story is complete without something to keep the couple apart from each other – at least for a time.
Ronald was supposed to study for a scholarship exam that would allow him entry into the institution that would become the most important in his life – Oxford. But between his captivation with Edith and his efforts to invent a new language, he found it a bit difficult to concentrate and failed to pass the test.
Father Francis, the benevolent guardian, was not too pleased with this relationship developing between his promising protégé and the young Protestant woman who was three years his elder. Before he even voiced his opposition, the two began to hide their meetings. “We thought we had managed things very cleverly,” Tolkien later wrote, but community gossip was stronger than their naive schemes.
Father Francis insistently demanded that Ronald end his “inappropriate” relationship with Edith immediately. He also arranged for Ronald and Hilary to move elsewhere. At the same time, Edith received an invitation to live in Cheltenham with an elderly lawyer and his wife, and she accepted.
In the period before Edith’s trip, they continued meeting secretly here and there, whenever they “happened” to bump into each other. She bought him a pen for his 18th birthday and he bought her a wristwatch for her 21st.
But when Father Francis heard that they had met again, he was furious. He even threatened to stop supporting Ronald’s academic career if he met, spoke, or wrote to Edith again until he reached the age of 21, at which point Ronald was no longer his responsibility.
What this meant was that the two endured three long years of forced separation. In the eyes of the young Tolkien, this was a truly horrible sentence.
Despite her longing for her Ronald, Edith liked her new life in Cheltenham, which was better than anything she had known before. Meanwhile, back in Birmingham, Ronald made his studies the focus of his life. He had close friends (who founded a secret society together), immersed himself in books, studied hard, began working on his own writing, played rugby, and continued working on languages, both historic and invented.
In 1911, after he finally passed his entrance exams, Ronald went off to study at Oxford and decided that despite everything, he was going to be happy there.
It wasn’t hard. Oxford quickly became the first real home he had known since his mother’s death.
But he never forgot Edith. He thought about her every day. Three years after they parted, at midnight between January 2nd and 3rd in 1913 when Ronald Tolkien became a man in his own right, he sat on the bed in his room at Oxford and wrote Edith a promise of renewed love, ending the letter with the question: “How long will it be before we can be joined together before God and the world?”
But when he received his lover’s reply, everything turned black. She, not sure he still remembered her or wanted her, was engaged to marry George Field, the brother of her classmate.
But Edith was too important to Tolkien to give her up without a fight.
He went to Cheltenham to speak to her heart. When he got off the train, Edith was waiting for him on the platform. What did they say to each other that day after three years of silence? Did they repeat those “great kisses” from their happy times on Duchess Road? Tolkien didn’t bother leaving us a detailed record of that day, but that evening, Edith gave back the ring that George Field had given her.
Finally, John Ronald Reuel Tolkien and Edith Bratt were an official couple. At first, they kept it a secret, trying to recapture the feeling from when they’d longingly sneak around in the past. They were worried (and rightfully so) about how their families would react. Eventually, they publicly announced their engagement, and in the middle of World War I, they were married in a very modest ceremony in a small Catholic church.
From that satisfying “happily ever after” moment, they shared a life that was a wonderful combination of love and devotion, alongside occasional disappointments and arguments. In other words, marriage.
Tolkien was drafted into the British Army during the war and returned from the battlefield in France, sick with a disease that was then known as “trench fever.” For two years he was in and out of the hospital. During the very long hours he spent in bed, he began to write what would later become his legendarium – sometimes called the “Tolkien Mythology” – the foundation of the world upon which the books he later wrote were based. The world he created would transform him into one of history’s bestselling authors.
Edith, who in the meantime had given birth to their eldest son while she was alone and far from her beloved, described this period as a “miserable wandering homeless sort of life”. She wrote to Tolkien, teasing him somewhat begrudgingly and bitterly: “I should think you ought never to feel tired again, for the amount of Bed you have had since you came back from France nearly two years ago is enormous.”
But once the war ended, Tolkien was given his first academic position at Oxford, and life could truly begin for the young Tolkien family.
They saw ups and downs. Edith was unhappy in the elitist academic environment. She hated Oxford, hated the Catholic Church she was forced to join, and she envied her husband’s male friends who were a significant part of his inner world to which she was not granted entry.
Despite the notable differences in their education and their documented arguments and mutual complaints, none of their relatives or acquaintances ever doubted that they shared a great love.
Edith was proud of her husband, whose academic and literary success became meteoric over the years. For his part, Tolkien was a loving and devoted husband and father who took part in household chores, spent a lot of time with his children, and invented one-of-a-kind stories for them.
Modern critics tend to criticize Tolkien for his attitude toward women. They quote a letter he wrote to his son before his marriage (in which he warned him that a husband should know how to stand up for himself), point out the very small number of female characters in his literary work, and blame him for the fact that Edith followed in the path of his professional career and lived for many years in places she wasn’t fond of and where she felt no personal connection.
The truth, as always, is more complex. Tolkien adored Edith, and valued women in general to a degree that was quite unusual for those times. In fact, as an undergraduate he spoke in support of the tactics and objectives of the suffragettes while taking part in a school debate.
During Edith’s final years, once Tolkien retired and no longer had any academic obligations, he was the one who followed her. He agreed to leave Oxford for her and live in a small seaside town where she was happy. Her happiness in turn made him happy, even though the move forced him to give up large parts of his former life. As for the female characters in his works, even if they were few in number, they are all strong and magnificent, and most of them are much more impressive and talented than the men appearing beside them.
The immortal Luthien, heroine of The Silmarillion, saves Beren her beloved, just as he saves her.
“There came a time near dawn on the eve of spring, and Luthien danced upon a green hill; and suddenly she began to sing. Keen, heart-piercing was her song as the song of the lark that rises from the gates of night and pours its voice among the dying stars, seeing the sun behind the walls of the world; and the song of Luthien released the bonds of winter, and the frozen waters spoke, and flowers sprang from the cold earth where her feet had passed.
Then the spell of silence fell from Beren, and he called to her, crying Tinuviel; and the woods echoed the name. Then she halted in wonder, and fled no more, and Beren came to her. But as she looked on him, doom fell upon her, and she loved him.”
Edith was Tolkien’s Luthien. She was also the inspiration for the character. When she passed away, two years before him, he illustrated this with an incomparably beautiful gesture of love.
“For she was (and knew she was) my Lúthien,” he painfully wrote to his son Christopher when the latter asked why he wanted to have “Luthien” engraved on her tombstone.
“I am afflicted from time to time (increasingly) with an overwhelming sense of bereavement […] Yet I hope none of my children will feel that the use of this name is a sentimental fancy. It is at any rate not comparable to the quoting of pet names in obituaries. I never called Edith Lúthien – but she was the source of the story that in time became the chief pan of the Silmarillion. It was first conceived in a small woodland glade filled with hemlocks at Roos 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). In those days 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, & I am left, and I cannot plead before the inexorable Mandos. […] Forever (especially when alone) we still met in the woodland glade, and went hand in hand many times to escape the shadow of imminent death before our last parting.”
From a letter to Christopher Tolkien, July 11, 1972
