“Farewell sweet earth and northern sky,
for ever blest, since here did lie
and here with lissom limbs did run
beneath the Moon, beneath the Sun,
Lúthien Tinúviel
more fair than Mortal tongue can tell.
Though all to ruin fell the world
and were dissolved and backward hurled;
unmade into the old abyss,
yet were its making good, for this―
the dusk, the dawn, the earth, the sea―
that Lúthien for a time should be.”
- J.R.R. Tolkien, The Silmarillion
So, for Valentine's Day, I was going to write a post about the romance of J.R.R. Tolkien and his wife Edith, but then I found this Wikipedia article that says everything I wanted to say and even has some awesome quotes that I never would have found on my own. It is very interesting. If you've read the story of Beren and Luthien in the Silmarillion but don't know the "real" story, it's definitely worth reading. I think you'll enjoy it. It's like something from a romantic idyll or from this one book I read that had this story of these two people who fell in love but they couldn't get married right away because one of them was an elf and one was - wait, that was the Silmarillion.
So how about this (since it is Valentine's Day) : Instead of writing up the facts in prose, seeing as Wikipedia has already beat me to it, I will render them in poetry. Everything's better in poetry, right? I mean Tolkien himself taught us that (see my post on Tolkien's poem "Mythopoeia").
For better or for worse (and entirely avoiding any thoughts on what Tolkien would say about it), I submit "Beren and Luthien":
In the spring of the world when you danced
Time stood still within my breast
Your eyes were bright as the sea of white stars
That swirled around your feet
But your hair was as dark as the valley of death
And filled with innumerous shadowings
I thought upon the days of our youth
When routed from my mother's house
Heavy with the scent of death
I came upon you sorrowing
Our tender hearts, o'er eager for love
Met once for all beneath the leaves
Long I sought you wandering far
As ever nearer out of reach
I chased your hem by the light of stars
We found each other all for once
And to each one clung quivering
You cast away your other life, to be but mine forevermore
We passed through dark and out of day
In woods of nightshade morrowless
And once we met in the valley wide
Amidst the war-death clamoring
And then it was my heart stood still
When you danced in the white stars sorrowless
When I returned from fog of war
We met again beneath the leaves
To cherish our eternity
And raise our children by the light of stars
And though your eyes were not as bright
As when you danced in the white sea-foam
My love for you could never dim
Our hearts danced once across the years
The story has gone crooked now
And I cannot plead to the moon-high gods
But into the stone of forevermore
I carve this word as immense as the sea
For me it contains the spring of the world
Held fixed in a clearing of white snow-flowers
As bright as the light that stood in your eyes
And your hair all shadowed with stars
