Look who’s Tolkien
Lord of the Rings author’s new book published... 100 years after he started it
HORDES of excited JRR Tolkien fans are saying “We wants it” after a tale he started writing 100 years ago was finally published yesterday.
The precious new book, called Beren and Lúthien, is set in Middle Earth just like his classic The Lord of the Rings trilogy and The Hobbit.
It chronicles the adventures of the lovers – a mortal man and an immortal elf respectively.
And the deeply personal work was partly inspired by the horrors that Tolkien – who died in 1973, aged 81 – witnessed on the battlefields of the First World War.
Tolkien specialist John Garth, author of Tolkien and the Great War, said: “When he came back from the trenches, with trench fever, he spent the winter [of 1916-17] convalescing. He’d lost two of his dearest friends on the Somme and you can imagine he must have been inside as much of a wreck as he was physically.”
Mr Garth said that during a walk in an East Yorkshire wood, Tolkien’s wife Edith danced in a glade filled with white flowers and the moment became a key scene in Beren and Lúthien. He said: “Tolkien felt the kind of joy he must have felt at times he would never feel again.”
The names Beren and Lúthien are carved on the gravestone that Oxford professor Tolkien and Edith share in the city’s Wolvercote Cemetery.
In the book, Beren and Lúthien try to steal from the evil being Melkor and the tale covers a series of daunting quests set against the backdrop of the couple’s forbidden love. It was edited by Tolkien’s son Christopher, 92, and extracted from a longer novel he developed and revised several times.
Christopher has kept Beren and Lúthien in the original form and also shown how the narrative changed to become part of The Silmarillion. The book is illustrated by Alan Lee, who won an Oscar for his work on Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings films. And HarperCollins published it on the 10th anniversary of the last Middle Earth book, The Children of Húrin.
The Lord of the Rings trilogy has sold 150 million copies worldwide, while the films – featuring ground-breaking effects to create ring-obsessed fiend Gollum – grossed £2.25billion.