Lúthien

Lúthien was born in the forest of Neldoreth in Doriath during the Years of the Trees, the only child of Elu Thingol, King of Doriath, and Melian, a Maia of the people of the Vala Lórien. Her parentage set her apart from every other being in Middle-earth: through her father she belonged to the Sindar, the Grey-elves of Beleriand who never crossed the Sea, while through her mother she carried the blood of the Ainur, the divine spirits who existed before the world. From this double inheritance came both her power of enchantment and the beauty for which she was accounted the fairest of all the Children of Ilúvatar. The published Silmarillion records that at her birth the white flowers called niphredil first bloomed in Neldoreth, as stars rising from the earth to greet her.

Her birth-name, Lúthien, is Sindarin, the tongue of her father's people. Her second and most famous name she received much later, and not from her kin: when the mortal Beren first came upon her dancing in a glade of Neldoreth, he called her Tinúviel, a poetic Grey-elven word for the nightingale, literally the daughter of twilight. The name answered her nature as much as the moment, for nightingales had attended her mother Melian in the gardens of Lórien before ever she came to Middle-earth. Her singing itself, where the chronicle describes it directly, is measured against the lark rather than the nightingale. Beren knew no other name for her, and under this one she entered song and legend.

In The Lord of the Rings the name reaches the Third Age as living memory rather than mere record. Aragorn, recounting her story to the hobbits below Weathertop, explains that Tinúviel signifies the nightingale in the ancient tongue, and names Lúthien the fairest maiden ever to walk the world; the Appendices likewise treat her as the great forerunner of the line from which Elrond, Arwen and the Kings of Men descend. Following the pronunciation rules given in Appendix E, the th of her name is voiceless as in English thin, and the accented ú marks a long vowel.

The events for which Lúthien is remembered begin with the arrival of a mortal in Doriath. Beren son of Barahir, sole survivor of an outlaw company destroyed in Dorthonion after the Battle of Sudden Flame, crossed the mountains and the haunted valleys beyond and passed through the Girdle of Melian, which no enemy and few strangers had ever crossed. He came upon Lúthien dancing at nightfall in Neldoreth and was bound to her from that hour; after searching through the autumn and the winter he found her again on the eve of spring, and she returned his love. Their meetings were kept secret until Daeron, the minstrel of Doriath who also loved her, carried word to her father. Brought before the throne at Menegroth and bound by an oath sworn to his daughter not to kill or imprison Beren, Thingol set instead a bride-price he thought impossible: a Silmaril from the iron crown of Morgoth. Beren departed to attempt it, and Lúthien was left behind.

Melian foresaw that Beren had fallen into peril, and when Lúthien resolved to go to him Daeron betrayed her a second time. Thingol had a house built high in the branches of Hírilorn, a great beech of three trunks in the north of the forest, and set her there under guard. She freed herself by her own craft: she lengthened her hair by a spell of growth, wove from it a garment of shadow charged with sleep and a rope by which to descend, laid slumber upon her wardens, and went out of Doriath alone. Celegorm and Curufin were hunting near the western marches of Doriath when Huan, Celegorm's own hound, came upon her where she had gone to ground by daylight, and brought her to his master. Celegorm, desiring her, broke off the hunt, took her into Nargothrond and held her there, intending to compel a marriage and to force an alliance from her father. She was delivered by Huan, the great hound of Valinor whom Celegorm had brought out of the West, and who was permitted to speak with words three times before his death; he brought her the shadowy cloak and bore her northward on his back.

They came to the isle of Tol-in-Gaurhoth, the tower on Sirion that Sauron had taken from Finrod Felagund, where Beren was held in the pits, and where Finrod had died defending him before she came. Lúthien sang from the bridge and Beren answered from below; Sauron sent out his wolves one by one, and Huan killed them, and at the last Sauron himself came in wolf-shape and was overthrown, shifting from serpent to his own form as he fought. Lúthien demanded the mastery of the tower and threatened to strip him of his bodily raiment, and he yielded it and fled north as a vampire form; the pits were opened, the captives freed, and Finrod was buried on the hilltop of his own isle. Returning south, the two met Celegorm and Curufin riding to Himring; Beren took from Curufin his horse and the dwarf-knife Angrist, and was wounded by an arrow shot at Lúthien as the brothers rode away. She healed him with herb and song, but he then abandoned her while she slept, meaning to go to Angband alone. Huan and Lúthien overtook him on the plain, and he yielded.

Huan had brought from the isle the hide of the werewolf Draugluin and the winged fell of Thuringwethil, Sauron's messenger, and in these shapes the two crossed the northern plain to the gates of Angband. There Morgoth had set Carcharoth, the greatest wolf yet bred, and when he challenged them Lúthien cast off her disguise and laid him under a spell of sleep. Passing down into the deep halls she came before Morgoth's throne, and having offered her service as a singer she slipped from sight and sang until the whole court, and at last Morgoth himself, sank into slumber and the iron crown rolled from his head. Beren cut a single Silmaril free with Angrist, but the knife broke as he tried for a second, and a flying shard struck Morgoth so that he stirred. They fled upward and found Carcharoth awake in the gateway; the wolf bit off Beren's right hand with the jewel in it and was driven mad by its burning, running howling into Beleriand. Thorondor and two of his eagles bore the wounded pair away and set them down within the bounds of Doriath.

Within the larger design of the legendarium Lúthien functions as a precedent rather than as a recurring actor: she is the first of the Elves to bind herself to a mortal, and the terms she accepted set the pattern by which later unions and later choices are measured. The Lord of the Rings makes this explicit in its own frame. Arwen is presented as the likeness of Lúthien come into the world a second time, and her choice to accept the doom of Men is described as a repetition of an ancient decision rather than a novelty; Elrond, who must lose her by it, is himself descended from that first union. Aragorn's telling of the tale to the hobbits serves the same function within the narrative, offering a mortal man and an Elven-lady in a hopeless case as the measure of his own. Lúthien is thus, in the published work, less a figure of power than the origin of a lineage and of a precedent.

Her power, so far as the Quenta describes it, is of a single kind: enchantment carried by voice and song, inherited from her mother among the Maiar and unmatched among the Eldar. Its effects are consistently those of suspension and concealment rather than destruction. She lays sleep upon guards, upon a wolf, and finally upon a whole court; she weaves a garment charged with drowsiness and a hair-rope by a spell of growth; she heals wounds with herbs and singing. She bears no weapon anywhere in the tale and kills no one: the fighting is done by Huan and by Beren, and even the contest with Sauron required the hound's strength alongside her mastery of the tower. Her entry into Angband depended on borrowed shapes taken from slain creatures, not on any power of her own to change form.

The two who stood closest to Lúthien by blood answered her in opposite ways, and the difference defines much of her story. Thingol's regard for his daughter was possessive: she was the one thing he valued above his treasure and his realm, and every measure he took concerning her — the price demanded of a suitor, the guard set upon her afterwards — was framed to keep her within Doriath. Melian, who saw further than her husband, neither forbade her daughter nor overruled the king, but told Thingol plainly that his own words had knit his fate to the Silmarils, and warned him that the doom he had set running would not stop at his borders. The Maia who could hedge a whole kingdom against invasion used no compulsion at all upon her child; her part throughout is foresight and counsel, offered and then left to be acted on.

Outside her family, Lúthien's alliances form a consistent pattern in which she supplies will and enchantment and her companions supply strength. Beren is the beloved but the lesser power of the two; Huan, given long before to Celegorm and bound by a foretold death, transferred his loyalty to her and disobeyed his own lord to do it. Against this stand those whose desire for her brought them nothing: Daeron, whose unreturned love left him at last a wanderer east of the mountains, making laments beside dark waters for one who was gone; and Celegorm and Curufin, whose designs upon her miscarried so completely that the people of Nargothrond turned against them and Orodreth put them out of the city. Lúthien is thus the point at which the oath of Fëanor's sons first touches Doriath, and it touches it through her person rather than through war.

The story is among the oldest Tolkien wrote, and its earliest surviving form differs from the published version at nearly every point. In 'The Tale of Tinúviel', composed toward the end of the First World War, her father is Tinwelint and her mother Gwendeling, the forerunners of Thingol and Melian, and Dairon — later reworked into an unrelated minstrel who loved her without return — is here her brother. Beren is not a mortal man but an Elf of the Noldoli, son of Egnor; and the enemy who holds him is neither a necromancer nor a lieutenant of the Dark Lord in any later sense, but Tevildo, Prince of Cats, a servant of Melko whose household stands in ancestral enmity to Huan, captain of the dogs. Certain elements were present from the first: the house set high in the branches of Hírilorn, the escape by a spell of growth and a woven robe of darkness, and the wolf who takes Beren's hand at the gate.

Lúthien has never been portrayed by an actor in any authorised film or television adaptation, and no adaptation has dramatised the events of her life. The reason is a matter of licensing rather than of choice: the screen rights held by the various producers have covered only The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, and the chapter in which her story is told belongs to the posthumously published Silmarillion, which remains unadapted. She therefore reaches the screen only at the points where The Lord of the Rings itself mentions her, as a name in a song and as an ancestor, and in every case she is spoken of rather than shown.