Beren and Lúthien

Beren and Lúthien, published in 2017, is not a newly discovered work by J.R.R. Tolkien but an edition made by his son: a single volume in which successive versions of one story are set out in sequence and joined by editorial commentary. Most of the material had already appeared in the long series of volumes devoted to the composition of the legendarium; here it is lifted out of that apparatus, stripped of much of its scholarly furniture, and rearranged so that one tale can be followed on its own. Prose alternates with verse, because the story was worked at in both forms over many years, and the text is accompanied by drawings and colour plates by Alan Lee. In his preface Christopher Tolkien remarked that he expected this to be the last of his editions of his father's writings.

The organising principle is the order of writing rather than the order of events, so the reader moves forward through decades of revision rather than through a plot. The editorial voice is deliberately restrained: it identifies where a passage comes from, notes what has changed, and leaves inconsistencies standing instead of harmonising them. Names shift, figures appear and are dropped, and the scale and colouring of the story alter; the book treats these as evidence to be shown rather than as flaws to be tidied away. An introductory account of the Elder Days is supplied for readers who need the surrounding history, which keeps the volume usable without the wider corpus at hand. The undertaking also had a private dimension, since Tolkien himself had attached the two names to his wife and to himself.

Within the legendarium the volume sits beside the compressed chapter that carries the story in the published Silmarillion, where the tale is ranked among those the Elves valued most highly, and it shows how much lay behind that condensation. It belongs with the other two of the three great tales of the Elder Days issued separately, though it differs from the continuous narrative given to the Húrin material and follows instead a documentary method later used again for the Gondolin volume. The intended reader is someone who knows the Silmarillion but has not worked through the drafts, and who wants to see a story in motion rather than in its settled form.

The materials gathered in the 2017 volume were written across some five decades, and the oldest of them is among the earliest sustained pieces of the legendarium. The prose tale of Tinúviel was composed in 1917, while Tolkien was in England recovering from the illness he had contracted on the Somme, and it belongs to the same burst of work that produced the first cycle of tales of the Elder Days. Writing more than half a century afterwards, shortly after his wife's death, Tolkien himself dated the impulse behind the story to that year and to a wood in Yorkshire near where he was then stationed. The 2017 edition prints substantial parts of that first version, so that the reader begins with a text roughly a century old at the date of publication, and one whose vocabulary, cast and tone differ markedly from anything later.

The second main layer is metrical. Tolkien began a long narrative poem on the story in rhymed couplets in the summer of 1925 and worked at it intermittently until September 1931, when he laid it aside unfinished, with the central episode reached but the tale not carried to its end. Alongside the poem he twice compressed the whole mythology into short prose surveys, in 1926 and about 1930, and the story appears in both in summary form; a fuller prose Silmarillion of the later 1930s was in turn interrupted when the sequel to The Hobbit claimed his attention. In the early 1950s he returned briefly to the abandoned poem and rewrote its opening on a larger scale without going far. The volume follows this sequence, so that verse and prose alternate according to the order in which the pieces were made rather than by form.

None of this was unpublished in 2017. The 1917 prose tale had appeared in 1984 in the second volume of the series devoted to the earliest writings, and the unfinished poem, together with its later reworking, in 1985 in the volume of the long narrative poems; the intervening prose stages were printed in subsequent volumes of the same series over the following decade. The condensed chapter that most readers knew had been published in 1977, four decades before, where the story occupies a few dozen pages of a continuous narrative. The 2017 book therefore adds no text by Tolkien that had not been in print, and its novelty lies in the selection, sequence and connecting commentary rather than in disclosure.

Publication took place on 1 June 2017, by HarperCollins in London and by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in Boston, in a trade edition and a deluxe issue. The date was chosen for its arithmetic: a hundred years after the first writing of the tale, and forty years after the appearance of the compendious Silmarillion which had been the editor's first undertaking on his father's behalf. Christopher Tolkien was then in his early nineties, and the preface is written in full awareness of that circumstance. A German translation by Helmut W. Pesch and Hans-Ulrich Möhring followed in the same year, and further translations appeared over the following years; no revised text has been issued, later printings and paperback reissues reproducing the edition as first published.

The editor's statement that this would be the last of his editions proved premature by one volume: a companion assembled on the same documentary principle, devoted to the third of the great tales, appeared in 2018 and closed the sequence in fact. Between them the two books completed a project begun a decade earlier with the continuous Húrin narrative of 2007, though the method of that first volume was not repeated. Christopher Tolkien published nothing further before his death in January 2020, so the 2017 book stands as the penultimate item in an editorial career of more than forty years.

No numbering runs through the volume. There are no parts, no chapters and no book divisions, and a reader looking for a particular stage of the story must navigate by the headings, which name the text an extract has been taken from rather than an episode of the narrative. The front matter consists of the editor's preface and the short introductory survey of the Elder Days already described; from there the book proceeds as one continuous sequence to its close. Commentary is interleaved rather than gathered at either end: each extract is prefaced or followed by remarks that place it in the sequence of composition, and stretches left unprinted are covered by a few lines of summary, so that the thread of the story is never broken even where the quoted text jumps.

Within that sequence the arrangement follows the date of writing. The earliest prose telling comes first and is given at greater length than any other single text, so that the opening portion of the book is occupied by a version most readers will not have encountered. Two very short prose summaries follow, each compressing the whole of the story into a few pages, and after them the long poem enters and takes the largest share of the volume, printed in extended runs of couplets with prose passages set between them. A fuller prose version supplies episodes the poem never reached, and the last of the main texts is the opening rewritten long afterwards, which breaks off early and leaves the book without a metrical conclusion.

The sequence does not stop with the two figures whose names stand on the cover. Because the jewel won in the quest passes afterwards into the keeping of the woodland kingdom and draws ruin after it, the editor carries the extracts on into that later history, printing an early account of the necklace made to hold the stone and of the destruction that followed. In the published compendium this material lies outside the chapter that carries the love story and forms a separate one of its own; it is included here to show the consequence that the earliest writing had already attached to the winning of the jewel, and it gives the volume an ending that the surviving drafts of the tale proper do not.

Three pieces of apparatus close the volume. An appendix sets out revisions made to the long poem, so that lines printed earlier in their first state can be compared with their later form; a list of names supplies brief identifications for the persons and places occurring in the quoted texts, including the many that were dropped or renamed as the legendarium changed; and a glossary explains archaic and obsolete words, most of them belonging to the verse. There is no index and no scholarly annotation of the kind carried by the volumes from which the texts were drawn. The illustrations are distributed rather than collected, line drawings falling within the text and colour plates in inserted gatherings, and they follow the story rather than the editorial argument.

The volume assumes its frame rather than supplying it. Nothing in it argues at length why the three jewels matter, how one of them came to be set in the Iron Crown of the Enemy, or what the oath sworn over them obliged the sons of Fëanor to do; that scaffolding belongs to the published compendium, and the short survey at the front does no more than sketch enough of it for the extracts to be followed. The reader is likewise expected to know already how the quest ends, since the sequence of drafts repeatedly approaches the same events from different distances and in different words. What the book contributes is depth at a single point of an existing structure: it is an annex to the Silmarillion chapter, not a rival account of the same matter, and it establishes no fact about the Elder Days that the compendium had not already fixed.

Among the stories of the First Age this one has the firmest footing in what Tolkien himself saw into print. Travelling towards Weathertop, Aragorn gives the hobbits a part of it, and the telling is placed there deliberately, since the union he recounts is the pattern of his own. The account of his courtship and marriage set out in the appendices turns on the same comparison, and the house of Elrond descends from the two figures whose meeting the 2017 book documents. A reader who knows only The Lord of the Rings therefore already has the outline of the tale and some sense of its weight, which is not true of the fall of Gondolin or of the ruin of the children of Húrin.

Against that settled outline the extracts stand in open disagreement, and the editor makes no attempt to reconcile them. In the earliest telling the lover is not a mortal at all but one of the Elvish kindreds, so that the difference of fate on which the later story depends is simply absent; the captor from whom he must be rescued is a lord of cats rather than the sorcerer who afterwards became the Enemy's lieutenant; the great hound's enmity, the manner of the escape and the names of nearly everyone involved were all revised later. The verse version and the prose stages that follow move by degrees towards the form printed in 1977, but none of them reaches it exactly. Statements taken from this book are accordingly true of a version and not of the story, and where an extract conflicts with the compendious chapter it is the chapter that carries the reference form.

The choice of this tale for such treatment answers to Tolkien's own estimate of it. In the long letter in which he described the mythology to a prospective publisher he set it at the head of the stories of the Elder Days and drew attention to the marriage of mortal and immortal as the motif on which the later history turns, the strand that runs down to the half-elven and to the choice imposed on them. The 2017 book makes that judgement visible in the documents, showing a story returned to across fifty years and never brought to a final shape, and it belongs to the posthumous layer of the corpus throughout: edited matter, not authorial publication, and dependent for its footing on the volume it was made to supplement.

Because its contents had already been in print, the book reached readers less as a disclosure than as a re-presentation: matter that had previously been available only inside a twelve-volume series aimed at students of the drafts was now offered as a single illustrated trade book. The visual continuity is part of that repositioning. Alan Lee, who had supplied the artwork for the separately issued Húrin narrative a decade earlier, illustrated this volume as well and the companion that followed a year later, so that the three books stand together in appearance even though only the two later ones share an editorial method. The deluxe issue and the ordinary hardback carry the same text and the same pictures, differing in binding and in the presentation of the plates.

Translation began without delay. The German rendering by Helmut W. Pesch and Hans-Ulrich Möhring came out in the year of the English edition, from the Stuttgart house that has carried Tolkien in German for decades, and it keeps the two names unaltered on the title page; versions in other European languages followed over the next few years. Translators faced an unusual demand, since the volume moves between the archaic prose of the first telling, long stretches of rhymed couplets, and modern editorial commentary, and each register has to be distinguishable from the others for the arrangement to make sense. The foreign editions reproduce the sequence of extracts and the closing apparatus as they stand rather than reselecting from the underlying drafts.

The book's appearance did not alter the standing of the texts it prints. The volumes of the composition series remain the place where the same drafts are given with their full apparatus and variant readings, and the chapter published in 1977 remains the reference form of the story for anyone citing it; what the 2017 volume supplies is a route into that material, not a new authority over it. Its lasting effect within the corpus lies in the method, which was taken up unchanged for the third of the great tales in 2018 and so became the pattern by which the series of separate editions was brought to a close.