The story first told in the Quenta Noldorinwa is now taken up until its end, with Lúthien becoming mortal so that she would not be separated from Beren (The Shaping of Middle-earth, pp. 110–15); and the story told in the Lay of Leithian (Cantos VIII–XIV; The Lays of Beleriand, pp. 235ff.) is then continued to the point where Tolkien abandoned the poem in 1931, just as Beren and Lúthien flee Angband and the wolf, Carcharoth, devours the Silmaril in Beren’s hand. This is accompanied by a short separate text, headed ‘a piece from the end of the poem’, which seems to refer to the Halls of the Dead in Valinor (The Lays of Beleriand, pp. 308–9).
At this stage Tolkien turned his efforts to a new, longer prose version of the ‘Silmarillion’, entitled *Quenta Silmarillion. After he had written the tale of Beren and Lúthien as far as the point at which Felagund gives his crown to Orodreth, he stopped because of its length and made a rough draft of the full story; and on the basis of this draft he made a second, shorter version which had reached the death of Beren by mid-December 1937, when Tolkien laid aside ‘The Silmarillion’ and began *The Lord of the Rings. Christopher Tolkien draws on both versions for the text in an explanatory bridging passage, while a brief extract from the published Silmarillion (pp. 182–3) brings Beren and Lúthien back to the borders of Doriath.
Christopher then looks back on the evolution of the story and raises one aspect he believes was of primary significance to his father: the fates of Beren and Lúthien after Beren’s death. He cites again their fates when both were Elves in The Book of Lost Tales, adding information about their return to Middle-earth (The Book of Lost Tales, Part Two, p. 40), and contrasting this with the fate decreed for Elves in ‘The Coming of the Valar’ (The Book of Lost Tales, Part One, p. 76) hinted at in the separate piece from the end of the Lay of Leithian. He discusses later ideas of the fate of the Elves and the choices offered to Beren and Lúthien in later versions of their story, citing The Silmarillion (p. 42), the Quenta Noldorinwa (The Shaping of Middle-earth, p. 115), and the Quenta Silmarillion (draft for the ‘short’ version of text, in *The Lost Road and Other Writings, pp. 303–4), and finishes with a summary of the version published in The Silmarillion, p. 187, in which the choice rested with Lúthien alone.
Although the Quenta Silmarillion and other works remained unfinished, Christopher Tolkien returns to earlier, usually brief accounts for the later history of the Silmaril with which Beren and Lúthien were concerned. He pieces together an account relating the return of Beren and Lúthien, the setting of the Silmaril in the Nauglafring (the necklace of the Dwarves), how possession of the necklace led to the death of Thingol and the son and grandsons of Beren and Lúthien, and how by its power Eärendil, husband of Elwing, granddaughter of Beren and Lúthien, was able to reach Valinor and obtain aid from the Valar against Morgoth. For these, Christopher uses extracts from the Quenta Noldorinwa (The Shaping of Middle-earth, pp. 132–4), The Silmarillion (p. 236), ‘The Nauglafring’ in The Book of Lost Tales (The Book of Lost Tales, Part Two, pp. 236–8), the Quenta Noldorinwa again (The Shaping of Middle-earth, p. 134), ‘The Nauglafring’ again (The Book of Lost Tales, Part Two, pp. 239–40, 242), and the Quenta Noldorinwa once more (The Shaping of Middle-earth, pp. 148–50). The end of the latter was superseded by the Quenta Noldorinwa (The Shaping of Middle-earth, p. 153) and essentially reached the form of the published Silmarillion (pp. 247–50). The account proper ends with a brief quote from the Quenta Silmarillion: ‘None saw Beren and Lúthien leave the world or marked where at last their bodies lay’ (The Lost Road and Other Writings, p. 305).
An appendix contains extracts from Tolkien’s reworking of the beginning of the Lay of Leithian, c. 1949–50. The first describes Beren and Barahir’s secret refuge (‘The Lay of Leithian Recommenced’, lines 173–98), then follows Gorlim’s treachery, with Sauron replacing Morgoth as its instigator, and Beren’s escape south (lines 199–592). This is followed by a ‘List of Names in the Original Text’ (not an index) ‘intended to assist a reader who cannot recall, among the mass of names (and forms of names), the reference of one that may be of significance in the narrative’ (Beren and Lúthien, p. 274). Some of the rarer names are given fuller explanation. Finally there is a glossary of ‘words (including forms and meanings of worlds differing from modern usage)’ (p. 286), with page references.
HISTORY
In his preface to this book Christopher Tolkien refers to a detailed study he made of the evolution of his father’s ‘Silmarillion’ writings following the publication of his own edition, The Silmarillion, in 1977. In 1981 he wrote to *Rayner Unwin about this study which he called The History of The Silmarillion:
In theory, I could produce a lot of books out of the History, and there are many possibilities and combinations of possibilities. For example, I could do ‘Beren’, with the original Lost Tale, The Lay of Leithian, and an essay on the development of the legend. My preference, if it came to anything so positive, would probably be for the treating of one legend as a developing entity, rather than give all the Lost Tales at one go; but the difficulties of exposition in detail would in such a case be great, because one would have to explain so often what was happening elsewhere, in other unpublished writings.
He told Unwin ‘that I would enjoy writing a book called “Beren” on the lines I suggested: but the problem would be its organization, so that the matter was comprehensible without the editor becoming overpowering’ (p. 10).
Now after many years during which ‘a large part of the immense store of manuscripts pertaining to the First Age, or Elder Days, has been published, in close and detailed editions; chiefly in volumes of *The History of Middle-earth’ (p. 11), Christopher returned to his original idea. Had it been published then, it ‘would have brought to light much hitherto unknown and unavailable writing. But this book [Beren and Lúthien] does not offer a single page of original and unpublished work. What then is the need, now, for such a book?’ In The History of Middle-earth the story of Beren and Lúthien, written by Tolkien during a wide span of years, is spread over several books and entangled with other events. ‘To follow the story … as a single and well-defined narrative’ (p. 12) is not easy. For the present book, then, on the one hand Christopher has
tried to separate the story of Beren and Tinúviel (Lúthien) so that it stands alone, so far as that can be done (in my opinion) without distortion. On the other hand, I have wished to show how this fundamental story evolved over the years. In my foreword to the first volume of The Book of Lost Tales I said of the changes in the stories …
development was seldom by outright rejection – far more often it was by subtle transformation in stages, so that the growth of the legends (the process, for instance, by which the Nargothrond story made contact with that of Beren and Lúthien, a contact not even hinted at in the Lost Tales, though both elements were present) can seem like the growth of legends among peoples, the product of many minds and generations.
It is an essential feature … that these developments … are shown in my father’s own words, for the method that I have employed is the extraction of passages from much longer manuscripts in prose or verse written over many years. [pp. 12–13]
Christopher notes that this brings ‘to light passages of close description or dramatic immediacy that are lost in the summary, condensed manner characteristic of so much Silmarillion narrative writing’, as well as elements ‘that were later altogether lost’ (p. 13), such as Tevildo, Prince of Cats.
Finally, acknowledging that the volumes of The History of Middle-earth