The J. R. R. Tolkien Companion and Guide: Volume 2: Reader’s Guide PART 1. Christina Scull

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ story of Beren and Lúthien was inspired by an incident in Tolkien’s life which occurred in late May or early June 1917, when *Edith Tolkien danced for her husband in a woodland glade. He described the event in a letter to his son Christopher in 1972:

      I never called Edith Lúthien – but she was the source of the story that in time became the chief part of the Silmarillion. It was first conceived in a small woodland glade filled with hemlocks at Roos in *Yorkshire (where I was for a brief time in command of an outpost of the Humber Garrison in 1917, and she was able to live with me for a while). In those days her hair was raven, her skin clear, her eyes brighter than you have seen them, and she could sing – and dance. [11 July 1972, Letters, p. 420]

      What this meant to Tolkien is shown by the inscription on the stone in Wolvercote Cemetery, *Oxford, marking the burial place of Ronald and Edith Tolkien: Edith Mary Tolkien, Lúthien, 1889–1971. John Ronald Reuel Tolkien, Beren, 1892–1973.

      Tolkien commented on the story in a letter to *Milton Waldman in ?late 1951:

      Here we meet, among other things, the first example of the motive … that the great policies of world history, ‘the wheels of the world’, are often turned not by the Lords and Governors, even gods, but by the seemingly unknown and weak – owing to the secret life in creation, and the part unknowable to all wisdom but One, that resides in the intrusions of the Children of God into the Drama. It is Beren the outlawed mortal who succeeds (with the help of Lúthien, a mere maiden, even if an elf of royalty) where all the armies and warriors have failed: he penetrates the stronghold of the Enemy and wrests one of the Silmarilli from the Iron Crown. Thus he wins the hand of Lúthien and the first marriage of mortal and immortal is achieved. [Letters, p. 149]

      CRITICISM

      Christina Scull has noted that the significance of the story became greater in later versions as the importance of the Silmarils grew in the legendarium, and the one recovered by Beren and Lúthien enabled Eärendel to reach Valinor and obtain help against Morgoth. She also has found that the love of Beren and Lúthien for each other ‘becomes deeper in successive retellings, and seems at last foreordained in the Music of the Ainur’ (‘The Development of Tolkien’s Legendarium: Some Threads in the Tapestry of Middle-earth’, in Tolkien’s Legendarium: Essays on The History of Middle-earth, ed. Verlyn Flieger and Carl F. Hostetter (2000), p. 16).

      T.A. Shippey in The Road to Middle-earth counts at least eight extant versions of the tale of Beren and Lúthien, varying in length, completeness, intrinsic merit, literary merit, and ‘importance for understanding the development of the whole story. Yet the existence of all the versions together does more than merely provide one with more “ox-bones” for study. It also radically alters the flavour of the soup, creating something of the “flavour of deep-rootedness” which Tolkien so often detected and admired’ (2nd edn. 1992, pp. 277–8; ‘ox-bones’ and ‘soup’ are references to *On Fairy-Stories). Shippey also discusses at length some small but significant details in the story, among them Beren’s oath to Thingol:

      If one had only the Silmarillion version of this scene, its logic and development would seem perfectly clear. One irreducible fact about Beren is that he becomes … ‘the One-Handed’. … Since this is an irreducible fact, surely it must all along have been part of the story that Beren, in the scene with Thingol, should find himself swearing an unknowingly ironic oath: in the words of the Silmarillion version, ‘when we meet again my hand shall hold a Silmaril’ – because of course when he and Thingol meet again his hand will be holding a Silmaril, but both will be in the belly of the wolf. With that established it would seem to be only plain sense for Thingol to have provoked the oath by setting up a hand for hand, jewel for jewel exchange, as again he so clearly does in the Silmarillion: bring me a jewel (the Silmaril) in your hand, and I will put in your hand a compensating jewel (Lúthien’s hand). …

      Yet a glance at the [Book of Lost Tales, Part Two] version shows that in the beginning these connections were simply not there. Beren does say, in his second meeting with Thingol (there Tinwelint), ‘I have a Silmaril in my hand even now’ … but in the first meeting does not make the corresponding promise. His exact words are only ‘I … will fulfil thy small desire’: which, of course, at the time of their second meeting he has still not done. [p. 278]

      Katharyn W. Crabbe in J.R.R. Tolkien (rev. and expanded edn. 1988) compares Beren as a hero to Túrin; like Túrin, he suffers loss and loneliness, but is motivated not by vengeance but by love. He is brave, and ‘although his pride may lead him to attempt the seemingly impossible, it does not lead him to mindless violence. It is a productive rather than a destructive pride … unlike Túrin, whose pride leads him time after time to bad decisions and self-destructive behavior’ (p. 194).

      Verlyn Flieger devotes two chapters in Splintered Light: Logos and Language in Tolkien’s World (2nd edn. 2002) to the story. She poses the questions: ‘Can the *free will of Men alter the fate of Elves? Does the fate of the Elf entangle the Man who intersects it?’ and finds that ‘both fate and free will appear to be involved … in the lives of Beren, Lúthien, and Thingol’ (p. 131). She examines their actions in this context, and in relation to the main theme of her book, that The Silmarillion is ‘a story about light. Images of light in all stages – bright, dim, whole, refracted, clear or rainbow-hued – pervade the songs and stories of the fictive. It is a world peopled with sub-creators whose interactions with and attitudes toward the light shape their world and their own destinies within it’ (p. 49).

      Iwan Rhys Morus in ‘The Tale of Beren and Lúthien’, Mallorn 20 (September 1983), comments that this story is

      in many ways a turning-point in the mythology for in it many of the various strands of other narratives are brought together and combined to bring about the doom of the Eldar. Indeed I would argue that one of Tolkien’s master-strokes in this tale is the irony of the fact that the Free People’s greatest achievement against Morgoth – the taking of a Silmaril from the Iron Crown – is the seed that brings about their eventual utter downfall. [p. 19]

      He discusses the influence of the episode at Roos on the story, and notes that this is not Tolkien’s only use of the motif of the ‘encounter in the woods’, citing among others Aragorn and Arwen, Thingol and Melian, Eöl and Aredhel, and Aldarion and Erendis. He suggests possible sources for elements of the story, in particular in the *Kalevala ‘the journey of Väinämöinen and Lemminkäinen to steal the Sampo, in which Väinämöinen’s singing casts the whole of Pohja into deep slumber’, and several wizards’ singing-contests.

      Around this central core Tolkien has piled a plethora of mythic themes and motifs. The striking image of a hand in a wolf’s mouth is straight from the Prose Edda: Fenris and the god Tyr. Lúthien with her escape via a rope of her own hair from prison is of course Rapunzel from Grimms’ Fairy Tales. The hunting of Carcharoth recalls the great quest for the Twrch Trwyth in ‘Culwch ac Olwen’ whilst the great hound Huan reminds me strongly of the most faithful of wolfhounds: Gelert in the old Welsh legend. [p. 22]

      Richard C. West in ‘Real-world Myth in a Secondary World’, Tolkien the Medievalist, ed. Jane Chance (2003), also comments on resonances from various sources which a reader might recognize and suppose to have influenced elements of the story. But he quite rightly points out that similarities do not necessarily mean influence, and that the differences are often far more marked than the similarities. As one example he cites ‘Rapunzel’, one of the Märchen collected by the Brothers Grimm, remarking that ‘Lúthien lets her hair down not just to allow her lover to reach her but to enable her to reach him’ (p. 263). Myth, legend, and fairy-tale ‘were an integral part of [Tolkien’s] mental furniture and imaginative make-up’, and what we read ‘over and over are echoes, even when we cannot pinpoint СКАЧАТЬ