The Lay of Leithian
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The Lay of Leithian is an unfinished poem written by J. R. R. Tolkien. It tells the Tale of Beren and Lúthien, the story of the love of the mortal Man Beren and the immortal Elf maiden Lúthien. The poem consists of over 4200 verses. It was published after Tolkien's death in The Lays of Beleriand. Its precedents are found in the Welsh tale of Culhwch and Olwen in the manuscripts, the Red Book of Hergest and the earlier White Book of Rhydderch.
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[edit] Title
The title of the poem, leithian is an Elvish word which derives from leithia, meaning "release." It is translated to release from bondage by the author. It is not known what the title refers to wherefore there are several possible interpretations.
Furthermore the title bears a strong resemblance to the word Leithien, the name for England in earlier versions of Tolkien's legendarium. This similarity may have been intentional.
[edit] Synopsis
After the ruin of his land in the Battle of Sudden Flame the Man Beren fled into the elvish realm Doriath. There he met the Elf-maiden Lúthien and they fell in love with each other. Thingol, the father of Lúthien, did not want his daughter to marry a mortal man. Therefore he asked Beren for a Silmaril, one of the hallowed jewels which the Dark Lord Morgoth had stolen from the Elves, as the bride price. With the help of Huan and Finrod Felagund, Beren and Lúthien defeated Sauron and came to Angband, where they stole a Silmaril from Morgoth's crown. The unfinished poem ends when they encounter the wolf Carcharoth at the gate of Angband.
Besides the main story the poem also tells of many events which happened before, like the meeting of Thingol and Melian, the oath of Fëanor, the return of the Noldor, the war of Beleriand and the duel of Fingolfin and Morgoth.
[edit] Analysis
The poem consists of over 4200 lines of iambic octameter. It is written in rhyming couplets.
[edit] Writing
Tolkien worked on The Lay of Leithian from the summer of 1925 until September 1931, when he abandoned it with only thirteen of the seventeen planned cantos completed. During the composition he made many amendments of the already existing parts of the poem, partially based on the criticism of his friend C. S. Lewis who had read the poem in 1929. In the 1950s, after the publishing of The Lord of the Rings, he resumed working on the poem, of which he rewrote many passages, particularly of the second canto which was expanded and split into two. Nevertheless the poem never reached a complete or definite form.
[edit] Publishing
In 1937 Tolkien sent the current version of The Lay of Leithian together with a prose version of the yet unfinished part of the poem to his publisher Allen & Unwin who had asked for further material of his fictional world after the success of The Hobbit. As Tolkien did not add any further information on the text the reader who was given it believed the poem to be an attempt to retell the prose version, which he thought to be a Celtic tale. Despite praising the prose he criticised the poem wherefore it was rejected. In 1985 the poem was published posthumously in The Lays of Beleriand, the third volume of The History of Middle-earth. The two versions of the poem are given independently, and the development of them is commented on in detail by Christopher Tolkien.
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[edit] External links
- Lay of Leithian at the Tolkien Gateway, with a Canto-by-canto analysis
