Beren and Lúthien

Tolkien's metamorphosic beast-fable

There are multiple different versions of the story of Beren and Lúthien, as Tolkien worked and reworked it repeatedly across the decades. It was of personal importance of him: the story of the coming-together of mortal man Beren, immortal elf-woman Lúthien, the most beautiful of her kind, cathected Tolkien’s own sentimental autobiographical narrative of love:

In a letter to his son Christopher, dated 11 July 1972, Tolkien requested the inscription LÚTHIEN for his wife Edith’s grave “for she was (and knew she was) my Lúthien.” He added, “I never called Edith Lúthien – but she was the source of the story ... It was first conceived in a small woodland glade filled with hemlocks at Roos in Yorkshire where she was able to live with me for a while.” In a footnote to this letter, Tolkien added “she knew the earliest form of the legend ... also the poem eventually printed as Aragorn's song [in The Lord of the Rings].” Particularly affecting for Tolkien was Edith's conversion to the Catholic Church from the Church of England for his sake upon their marriage; this was a difficult decision for her that caused her much hardship, paralleling the difficulties and suffering of Lúthien from choosing mortality.

Tolkien conceived the first iteration of the story in the nineteen-teens, wrote several versions through the 1920s, in prose and verse, reworked it and rewrote. I first encountered the story in the version printed in The Silmarillion—the 1977 BCA first edition I got for Christmas that year, when I was twelve, and which I still possess: ‘Chapter 19, Of Beren and Lúthien’.

Unlike the lengthy, rambling, messy, self-contradictory version printed in The Book of Lost Tales (1984-5), or the drab-age versifying that spools the story out over 4200 lines of poetry in ‘The Lay of Leithian’ (without even finishing), the Silmarillion version is a brisk 25-page summary of the story. Tolkien considered it one of the ‘Great Tales’ of his legendarium, worthy of being written up properly at Lord of the Rings-length, although he never actually did this (the other ‘Great Tales’, all set in the First Age, are: The Children of Húrin, The Fall of Gondolin and The Voyage of Eärendel). I daresay, if I delved into AO3. I’d find fan-written 1000-page expansions of all four.

For ‘Beren and Lúthien’, though, concision is the better option. In the Silmarillion version, Beren is a man brought low: of royal blood, but the only survivor of an attack by Orcs that killed his father and all his people, living in the wilderness on nuts and berries: ‘for four years more Beren wandered still upon Dorthonion, a solitary outlaw; but he became the friend of birds and beasts and they aided him, and did not betray him, and from that time he ate no flesh nor slew any thing that was not in the service of Morgoth’ [164]. Vegetarian Beren stumbles (Tolkien’s word) into the Elven kingdom of Doriath, where he sees, on a starlit night, the beautiful Lúthien dancing ‘upon the unfading grass in the glades beside Esgalduin’. He is struck dumb by her beauty, literally: ‘he became dumb, as one that is bound under a spell, and he strayed long in the woods, wild and wary as a beast’ [165].

Encountering Lúthien again, this time singing on a green hill in the sunshine, breaks the spell of silence, and Beren and Lúthien fall in love. Elven king Thingol, Lúthien’s father, disapproves, and sets Beren an impossible quest in order to win his daughter: ‘bring me in your hand a Silmaril from Morgoth’s crown; and then, if she will, Lúthien may set her hand in yours’ [167]. No small task, this: Morgoth is, basically, Satan himself. Beren vows that he will do this: ‘when we meet again my hand shall hold a Silmaril from the Iron Crown; for you have not looked the last upon Beren son of Barahir.’

This is a fairy-story premise: the king sets the commoner a series of impossible tasks in order, he thinks, to prevent him from marrying his princess daughter; only of course the commoner achieves the tasks and wins the girl. In Beren’s case this adventure happens in four stages. First he travels to Nargothrond and recruits the Noldor (that is, elven) King Finrod Felagund to the mission. Then a party of twelve—like Lord of the Rings’s fellowship—head out to seize the magic jewel: ‘on an evening of autumn Felagund and Beren set out from Nagorthrond with their ten companions.’ They make their way to the tower of Sauron—in this story, Sauron is merely Morgoth’s lieutenant, although obviously a being of might, magic and malevolence. Sauron ambushes the twelve, and Felagund and he have a magical song-off, fighting one another through the medium of directing ‘songs of power’ at one another. But however potent the elf-king, Sauron is greater, so the twelve are stripped naked and cast into ‘a deep pit, dark and silent.’ At this point Lúthien understands that something bad has happened to Beren, because ‘a weight of horror’ comes upon her heart. She sets out to rescue him, taking with her a giant, magic dog called Huan: ‘he was not born in Middle-earth, but came from the Blessed Realm’. Despite being a hound he is given the magical power of speech, although only on three occasions. Lúthien rides him like a steed. Meanwhile things are going badly for the twelve imprisoned in Sauron’s oubliette: the bad-guy keeps sending-in a werewolf to eat one of the twelve. Soon enough there’s only Beren and Felagund left. Sauron sends the werewolf in to eat Beren, but Felagund intervenes, battles the beast, killing it, afterwards dying himself. There’s a poignant deathbed speech (‘I go now to my long rest in the timeless halls beyond the seas and the Mountains of Aman’). Then, aboveground, Lúthien arrives, and sings ‘a mighty song of power.’

A song that no walls of stone could hinder. Beren heard … and in answer he sang a song of challenge … Lúthien heard his answering voice and she sang then a song of greater power. The wolves howled, and the isle trembled. Sauron stood in the high tower wrapped in his black thought. [174]

Sauron sends a wolf to eat Lúthien, but the magic hound Huan kills it. So then Sauron comes down in person, assumes the shape of a giant wolf, and battles Huan—but to no avail. Losing the fight Sauron shifts shape again: ‘from wolf to serpent, and from monster to his own accustomed form’. At the point of death, Lúthien spares him in return for being given mastery of his island, whereupon Sauron ‘immediately took the form of a vampire, great as a dark cloud across the moon, and he fled, dropping blood from his throat upon the trees and came to [the forest of] Taur-na-Fuin, and dwelt there, filling it with horror.’ [175] So to be clear: in this story Sauron is both, quite explicitly, a werewolf and a vampire.

Lúthien having rescued Beren, the story moves into its penultimate act. Veggie-B still has to get his hand, literally, on one of the Silmarils from Morgoth’s iron crown. For this portion of the quest, Beren becomes a werewolf himself (‘Beren became in all things like a werewolf to look upon, save that in his eyes there shone a spirit grim indeed but clean’) and Lúthien turns into a giant bat. You read that correctly. Off they go:

They passed through all perils, until they came with the dust of their long and weary road upon them to the drear dale that lay before the Gate of Angband. Black chasms opened beside the road, whence forms as of writhing serpents issued. On either hand the cliffs stood as embattled walls, and upon them sat carrion fowl crying with fell voices. Before them was the impregnable Gate, an arch wide and dark at the foot of the mountain; above it reared a thousand feet of precipice. There dismay took them, for at the gate was a guard of whom no tidings had yet gone forth. Rumour of he knew not what designs abroad among the princes of the Elves had come to Morgoth, and ever down the aisles of the forest was heard the baying of Huan, the great hound of war, whom long ago the Valar unleashed. Then Morgoth recalled the doom of Huan, and he chose one from among the whelps of the race of Draugluin; and he fed him with his own hand upon living flesh, and put his power upon him. Swiftly the wolf grew, until he could creep into no den, but lay huge and hungry before the feet of Morgoth. There the fire and anguish of hell entered into him, and he became filled with a devouring spirit, tormented, terrible, and strong. Carcharoth, the Red Maw, he is named in the tales of those days, and Anfauglir, the Jaws of Thirst. And Morgoth set him to lie unsleeping before the doors of Angband, lest Huan come.

Lúthien sends Carcharoth to sleep with a magic spell. The two go inside Morgoth’s castle, and approach his throne, with Beren ‘slinking in wolf’s form beneath his throne’ but Lúthien sheds her animal disguise and offers to sing for Morgoth. The dark lord, distracted by what Tolkien calls ‘an evil lust’ for Lúthien, ‘and a design more dark than any that had yet come into his heart since he fled from Valinor’—rape, one presumes—agrees. But the song Lúthien sings is a magic charm that sends him and his court to sleep. Beren, shedding his wolf form, cuts the Silmaril from Morgoth’s crown, grasping it in his right hand, which starts to glow from the light of gemstone.

They flee, but on the way out they encounter the giant wolf Carcharoth, who has recovered from the spell put upon it. Beren attempts to ward wolfie off with his shining hand—‘get you gone and fly! For here is a fire that shall consume you and all evil things!’ This strategy doesn’t work: the wolf is undaunted, and bites off Beren’s hand at the wrist. ‘Then swiftly all his innards were filled with a flame of anguish, and the Silmaril seared his accursed flesh.’ Carcharoth runs off howling, and Lúthien and Beren are rescued from certain death at the gate of Morgoth’s lair by certain giant birds, who remembered Beren from his days in the wilderness, and who fly in ‘lift up Lúthien and Beren from the earth and bore them aloft.’ Back in Doriath, Beren can truthfully claim he has fulfilled his vow.

Thingol answered: ‘what of your quest, and of your vow?’

But Beren said: ‘It is fulfilled. Even now a Simaril is in my hand.’

Then Thingol said: ‘Show it to me!’

And Beren put forth his left hand, slowly opening its fingers; but it was empty. Then he held up his right arm.

He gets the girl. The elves of Doriath go wolf-hunting and track Carcharoth down. Beren stabs the beast with a spear, but Carcharoth knocks him down and bites his chest. Huan then kills Carcharoth, and the elves cut the jewel from its belly. Beren is carried back to Menegroth on a bier of branches, where Lúthien embraces him and tells him to wait for her beyond the Western Sea: for her love has made her mortal.

The story’s final act: Beren dies and his spirit waits for Lúthien’s in ‘the Halls of Mandos’, a sort of spiritual antechamber, where the ghosts of men and of elves wait to be judged by Mandos himself, as with the haunting and magical rhyme:

Why not enjoy a chicken Nandos
Whilst waiting for judgement by Mandos?

Soon after Lúthien herself dies: ‘her spirit fled and her body lay like a flower that is suddenly cut off and lies for a while unwithered on the grass.’ In the Halls Lúthien then sings a special song before Mandos, ‘the song most fair that ever in words was woven.’ This moves Mandos to pity, ‘who never before was so moved, nor has been since’. He gives Lúthien a choice: she can pass beyond the western sea and dwell in Valinor, the Blessed Realm, until the end of the world, forgetting her sorrow, but without Beren; or she and Beren can return to Middle-earth and live together ‘without certitude of life or joy.’ She chooses the latter option, and she and Beren live out a mortal lifespan together, having a son (their great-grandson is Elrond) and eventually dying.

Tom Shippey considers Beren and Lúthien as a version of the classical legend of Orpheus in the underworld, Greek myth translated by Tolkien into the world and characters of his own legendarium, with mutiple added-in multiple other mythic and folktale story-elements: ‘he had not yet freed himself from his sources,’ Shippey says, somewhat disparagingly, ‘as if trying to bring in all the older bits of literature that he liked instead of forging a story with an impetus of its own.’ Here’s Shippey’s schematic of these elements:

Others have considered the story in its biographical context, as mentioned above: the idealising of Tolkien’s courtship and love for his wife Edith. Some find this romantic, touching, beautiful. I’ve not always found it so, I must confess: Tolkien saying to this woman ‘give up your surname and take mine; give up your religion and take mine; and when you are dead I shall put on your gravestone not your actual name, not even my name, but the name from a mythology I invented, turning you into a fictional character I made.’ It seems to me a diminishment. Not that Tolkien’s private life is any of my business. Maybe Edith was entirely happy.

The issue of diminishment is pertinent to the larger story trope here, the way Beren and Lúthien is structurally replicated in Lord of the Rings. In the former, a fellowship of twelve ride out, a human prince, an elven king and ten more eleven warriors, to retrieve a mighty transcendent jewel in which holy starlight is present; they encounter great evil and are temporarily cast into the depths of the mountain, where all but one is killed; but the hero escapes, faces down the greatest evil, retrieves the jewel, suffering the amputation of his hand in the process, to return to the consummation of his love with the most beautiful woman the world has ever seen. In the latter story: a fellowship of nine (not twelve) walk out: two humans, an elf and six beings of miniature stature, to dispose of a small gold ring, in which magical malevolence is present; they encounter great evil and are temporarily cast into the depths of the mountain, where one is killed, although he later returns; they are facing not the greatest evil, but his second-in command; the hero manages, with some difficulty, to dispose of the ring, suffering in the process the amputation not of his whole hand but one finger; he returns to his former life, never to marry, and living out the remainder of his existence with sense of loss and grief. Of course, the falling-away of the world, from a Golden Age to one of bronze, itself passing away and ushering in our present Age of Lead, is the larger trajectory of Tolkien’s view of things. As to why he was so fascinated by, and kept returning to, magic jewelry, quests, mutilation of hands and so on, is a question of psychological speculation.

But what struck me, rereading the Silmarillion version of ‘Beren and Lúthien’ recently. was not this. My memory was of the love-story aspect, and the clever plot-twist in which Beren filfuls his oath to return to Thingol with a Silmaril ‘in his hand’, and does so even though he no longer has a hand—comparable, in position in the story and satisfying ingenuity, to Lord of the Rings’s Macbeth-inspired ‘I am no man!’ as Éowyn kills the Nazgûl. But rereading I was struck by a different aspect. I had forgotten, or not before really noticed, the extent to which ‘Beren and Lúthien’ is a beast fable.

Consider all the shape-shifting: Lúthien turning herself into a bat; Beren into a wolf—such that he is not the ordinary man we assume him to be at the start of the story, but is a werewolf—and Sauron shifting to wolf, snake, vampire and others. There is the magic dog Huan, who can speak (although he can only do so thrice) and the fell wolf Carcharoth. There is the period when Beren lives voiceless in the wilderness, like a beast. Tolkien returns to the shapeshifting animal-man in The Hobbit, where Beorn is sometimes a human being and sometimes a great bear; and the Hobbit also includes a talking animal—the thrush, at the Lonely Mountain. But Lord of the Rings contains no shapeshifters, and no talking animals.

Why is Beren a werewolf? What, in terms of plot or event, does this add to the story? Nothing. (We might ask: if Beren can shift to wolf-form, why doesn’t he do so when he is imprisoned in Sauron’s pit, and his companions are being eaten one by one by, precisely, werewolves? We could also ask: were these werewolves Sauron himself? The story tells us he has the power to shift to the form of a wolf, and does so later one. Did Sauron gobble down Beren’s companions?) He turns into a wolf at Angband, but does nothing more than slink under Morgoth’s throne, and then turns back into a man to encounter Carcharoth. Why, though?

Lúthien can change her shape into that of a giant bat; but she is also the nightingale, on account of her singing—Beren gives her the name Tinúviel, which signifies ‘nightingale’. According to the in-story logic of Tolkien’s elaborate linguistic fantasy, the name Beren is Sindarin for ‘brave’; but if we encountered an actual European folk story about a warrior who could change his shape into a mighty beast, we would of course understand that ‘Beren’ means bear. Why Beren shapeshifts into the form of a wolf, rather than into a bear, is another puzzle, with Tolkien having to add-in a qualifier that though shapechanged Beren looks like a dire and dreadful wolf, you could tell that he wasn’t an evil wolf because of the particular virtuous light that shines in his eyes. Beorn, in The Hobbit, isn’t integral to the story either—he hosts the party of dwarfs and Bilbo, and then the novel drops him: he pops up, mentioned briefly in passing, in the final battle, and that’s all there is of him. There are other episodic encounters in The Hobbit, of course, which is a peripatetic narrative, but these are generally paid-forward into the Lord of the Rings: riddles in the dark, and Gollum, feed directly through to the later story of course, but the Mirkwood spiders are connected via their mother, Shelob, and even the encounter with the trolls is referenced. But Beorn: nothing. Tolkien goes from being fascinated with human-animal metamorphosis, and filling his story with it, to alluding briefly to it, to omitting it altogether. From Ovidian flow and mutability to a setting, a fixity.

What are the various transformations of Beren and Lúthien about? The core dynamic is the love of a mortal man for an immortal semi-divine woman (Lúthien’s father is an elvish king, but her mother was a goddess). The hierarchy of beast à human and the hierarchy of man à goddess stand in parallel, and the purpose of the story is the breaching of this distinction, the coming together of the two. The blurring of identity from person to animal figures this.

Then again, Beren’s love for Lúthien is an elevating, ennobling thing. The vector of human-to-animal transformation runs the other way: all these werewolves, bats and vampires in this text is striking. With the werewolf transformation, the story is perhaps saying something about rapaciousness, about predatoriness, presumably connected to male sexual desire: as with Morgoth’s un-spelled-out ‘an evil lust’ and ‘design more dark’.

Marina Warner’s Fantastic Metamorphoses, Other Worlds: Ways of Telling the Self (Oxford 2002) sets out to ‘find out about the types and processes of metamorphosis that were described in the tradition and to read them in order to throw light on changing ideas about persons and personhood.’ Warner distinguishes four types of metamorphosis: mutating, hatching, splitting, doubling – and uses it to guide an inquiry into the relationship between a particular set of what Warner calls ‘congeners’—‘materials through which one culture interacts with and responds to another’—and a particular set of imaginative enterprises. The former consist of little known ethnographic and scientific documents created in the aftermath of the European encounter with the Americas, while the latter range from Francesco Colonna’s The Dream of Poliphilo to Lewis Carroll’s Sylvie and Bruno stories, taking in works by Michelangelo, Coleridge, Hogg, Stevenson, Kafka, Jean Rhys and numerous others.

She compares and contrasts Ovid and Dante, the former representing ‘metamorphosis free of any fixed moral status’ the latter a Christianised-moral form, in which transformation is a function of Hellish and diabolic process—the many metamorphoses and blendings of animal and human in Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights is positioned almost as a mediating work between these two: Ovid’s ‘fruitarian Golden Age’, Christianity’s aversion to female fleshliness and sex. James Lasdun summarises Warner’s argument:

Ovid’s chain reactions of transformation emit a liberating energy like nothing else in literature. Occurring always at some limit of human capacity or tolerance, they have something of death in them, something of birth, something of sex, but something else, too: a mysterious reverse flow, whereby the things people turn into – tree, rock, flower, fountain, bird, beast – miraculously release their own potentialities back into the human universe of the poem. It was Pound who suggested the Old Testament be replaced by Ovid (‘say that I consider the writings of Confucius and Ovid’s Metamorphoses the only safe guides in religion’), and D.H. Lawrence seems to be on similar ground in his famous rejection of ‘the old stable ego of the character’ in favour of ‘another ego, according to whose action the individual is unrecognisable and passes through, as it were, allotropic states’.

The grim reflection of this liberation is more relevant to Tolkien’s tale: not light but darkness, not angels but demons. Warner connects this with imperial exploitation, expropriation and slavery, especially in the Americas. She traces an account of how ‘the éclat of wonder is displaced by guilt-racked greed and fear’. Robert Southey’s History of Brazil introduces the West to the figure of the zombie, and the European imagination takes this up, starting with Coleridge: bodily change figuring ‘imperialism’s themes of consuming, using up, hollowing out’. ‘The throng of the undead also includes soucouyants and revenants, and other permutations on the vampire/zombie pattern thriving in the prevailing atmosphere of anxiety.’ Other demons follow, through the nineteenth- and twentieth-centuries: spirits, werewolves, androids—Warner does not discuss bear-men, berserkers or werebears, which is a strange omission. Is this the lens through which to read Tolkien’s story of forbidden love, werewolves, bats and vampires? Warner notes that the first werewolf was Lycaon, ‘who serves up a cannibal meal to Zeus, and is turned into a werewolf; the penalty fits the crime’.

For Warner, these stories of transformation formally actualise the ‘exchanges and encounters at the confluence of cultures, as in the case of zombies.’

Tales of metamorphosis proliferated [through the eighteenth- and nineteenth-centuries, themselves multi-limbed, protean, polymorphous: the era of secularization, scientific inquiry, epistemological adventures in the pursuit of clear Reason saw a bubbling spate of fables, dramas, romances, fancies, and harlequinades in which animals turn into human beings myriad transformations; in which souls leave living bodies to fly to other dimensions of existence and return; or départ from their fleshly host to take up occupation of another: poems and stories told of identities doubling and redoubling through body-hopping, body-squatting, or spirit travels, also known as the shamans flight. [Warner, 26-7]

There’s a lot of this in the tangled, protean mixture of elements that go into Tolkien’s Beren and Lúthien.